COVID-19 has dramatically changed the eCommerce development strategies by making a huge focus on the digital channels of customer traffic, according to McKinsey.
Over the recent 4 years, the compound annual growth rate increased by around 14%. However, a huge growth of over 25% was recorded in a two-week period in March 2020.
That’s only one of the numerous reasons why the eCommerce businesses have suddenly switched their targets, and become highly interested in expanding their digital presence.
Now, shopping habits have also changed: over 78% of consumers prefer smartphone retail app usage for their shopping at least multiple times a week, and over 40% of them — do it on a daily basis.
So, what makes retail apps that popular, and what features do consumers look for in their retail shopping apps? Discover more with Intellectsoft!
Apps for Retailers: Key Benefits for Online and Offline Stores
Before you start investing in retail app development, it’s critical to understand what will you and your business get after its launching, and if the retail store app is actually worth its money.
In fact, there are numerous advantages of developing eCommerce shopping applications:
Enhance eCommerce
One of the prime benefits the retail store apps can bring to your business is boosting your eCommerce. According to the statistics shared by the Think With Google team, each second of shopping apps installed on user’s smartphones are used at least weekly.
So, after you’ve launched a retail app, your business can easily get the additional customer channel with tons of traffic and purchases!
Launch Loyalty Program
Around 80% of companies agree that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition, and increasing customer retention by only 5% can boost the business ROI by 25% to 95%. One of the easiest ways to establish a strong and trustful relationship with your customer is to always keep them engaged via the retail store app.
The trick is quite easy: consumers are more likely to become your loyal customers and recommend your eCommerce business to others if you can offer some valuable offers to them!
Establish Better Connection with Your Customers
Needless to say, that retail store app is important not only to sell the products online but also to always stay informed about the customer feedback regarding the service itself, product quality, and its delivery.
By regularly reviewing the comments and analyzing your customer behavior and trends shown in the mobile retail store, it becomes way easier to find out what products you should focus on, and what strategy works better for your business.
The retail app can also become a powerful tool for keeping in touch with the clients and reminding them about the special events, deals, and limited sales available at the moment, which can also generate additional revenue for your business.
Features of an Excellent Retail Application
After we’ve covered the main benefits eCommerce can get after launching a retail store app, it’s time to learn the basic features customers always look for in the retail mobile apps.
In fact, these include not solely the sign-up and payment features, but also plenty of other details eCommerce businesses usually ignore when they start developing their retail apps.
Product Review and Detailed Feedback
Over 90% of consumers make the purchase only after reading the review section, as it shows the real customer experience during the product utilization.
For sure, no one wants to buy a pig in a poke, so now consumers are greatly oriented at the real product quality, check the order delivery and the product rate as well. By including this in your retail mobile app, you can significantly increase not only the UX but also improve sales as well.
Easy Registration and Checkout
According to the marketing best practices, the two core points that can prevent people from leaving your app without any purchase are the quick signing-up procedure and cart checkout.
If you require too much information during the registration, the potential customer will be more likely to leave your retail app without even browsing the categories in it. Some eCommerce platforms tend to ask for the information they won’t even use, for instance: “Do you have children/ a car?”
Offline Performance
Setting up the offline capabilities for a retail app can be a perfect chance to engage more clients with it. Many smartphone users want to use the app anytime and anywhere, even if the network connection is lost, and that’s where the retail shopping apps can be a key option that enhances sales.
The opportunity to browse various products with limited data usage can significantly improve the overall user experience and app performance. One of the most effective examples of it — Spotify Music or Google Maps, since they can provide an excellent user experience and effective app performance the retail apps need to include as well.
Mobile Payments
Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit people have become more and more interested in online shopping: the share of adults who shopped more online in May 2020 has reached 52% according to Statista, and this tendency hasn’t lost its popularity in 2021.
The highest client traffic worldwide last year was obtained by Amazon.com, one of the world’s most famous retail store apps.
Including the multiple payment options to your retail app can significantly enlarge the visitor’s conversion into your clients or even loyal customers. That’s why it’s critical to make sure your app can provide users with the various payment options that are secure and fast — after they’ve had a great buying experience, they can definitely come again later.
And vice versa, after they didn’t manage to buy a product because of the payment issues or the payment methods unavailable, they’re close to leaving a retail app without any purchase.
Push Notifications
Last but not least among features of the retail app is the ability to notify users about the new products available, attractive sales and great deals, holiday reminders, and events they might be interested in.
With regularly keeping them updated, your retail store app can greatly enhance sales and provide a much better user experience for your clients as well. Just make sure your app is not too obsessive with the notifications and can provide value to its users — it’s the key point of the push notifications: to inform, not to bother.
Retail Shopping Apps: From Idea to Launching
Those who are interested in how to create a retail app should also be aware of the key points that define the cost of retail application development.
Depending on what features you expect to get in the final product, the cost of a basic retail app can vary from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. As a rule, the basic features include:
- Size and Scale of Your Retail App. Needless to add, the more devices you want to run your app on, the more advanced features you’re going to cover in it, the more elaborated app management system is required — the higher are the costs for retailer app development.
- Unique Design and Comfortable Interface. The design concept and comfortable user experience are as important as the functional part of the retail apps. This is why, your team of developers should look for opportunities to present the features of the retail mobile app in a new way, which usually requires additional spendings for creating multiple variants of the idea presenting.
- Timeframe and Quality Rates. Having involved a dedicated team of developers from different countries, business owners should be also aware of their service costs. For instance, it often happens that the US/UK developers are a few times more expensive than the talents from East European Countries such as Poland or Ukraine, with the same or even more qualified experts in creating retail apps. Such a little difference at first can lead to higher expenses for the retail mobile app development as a result.
- Testing and Improving. After you’ve completed the app creating, you definitely should also include the QA testing in your retail mobile app development budget. That’s one of the most critical processes that help you to monitor the retail app performance, fix the bugs, and add the missing features to the final product before its release. Additionally, it can greatly help in detecting any retail app issues and checking all the functions listed in the requirements to deliver the right product to your consumers.
Knowing all these pitfalls when making the budget plan for your retailer mobile app can assist in better understanding how to create a retail app and what are the key points you should consider before starting the app’s actual development process.
Conclusion
To sum up, creating retail apps is a complex and challenging process that requires not only the product’s detailed planning, analyzing and testing. It also needs a deep understanding of the marketing trends and user experience for creating high-quality and functional retail applications and software.
Here, at Intellectsoft, we know how important retail application development is. Furthermore, the teams of our best developers empower hospitality companies and their workforces with innovative solutions and approaches.
So, if you and your organization are looking for the right team of dedicated developers to start —talk to our experts and find out more about creating a retail app and how your business can start benefiting from it today!
