Background
In a world wounded by covid, convenience in shopping is paramount for customers. Consequently, the eCommerce sector is witnessing explosive growth. Global retail online sales are flourishing at 9.8% CAGR to touch $6.3 trillion in 2024. With comfort and personalized customer experiences, the enthusiasm for eCommerce mobile apps among consumers is palpable.
Consequently, every brick-and-mortar store wants their custom eCommerce app for sales to increase dramatically. Despite this wild spread of digital commerce services, online retailers are witnessing a staggering 70.19% cart abandonment rate. This high cart abandonment rate must raise the eyebrows of businesses toward the need to optimize the checkout experiences.
Synopsis
Customers’ expectations have ballooned alongside the rise in eCommerce sales. Beyond basic customer service, customers expect eCommerce stores to deliver frictionless, personalized customer experiences throughout the end-to-end customer journey. One critical aspect of improving customer experiences and offering frictionless buying journeys is considerably and consistently reducing the cart abandonment rate by optimizing checkout experiences.
This blog acts as a solution-oriented guide that answers all the critical questions related to enhancing the customer journey toward a user-friendly and frictionless checkout process through custom ecommerce app development. This blog will navigate the digital commerce landscape, identify relevant technologies, and evaluate the eCommerce app development process to optimize the checkout experience that turns browsers into buyers quickly.
When businesses decide to adopt digital transformation, there is no space for half-measures. The acceleration in digital commerce services makes it incumbent on businesses to adapt to new technologies and adhere to the latest and futuristic trends. Custom eCommerce app development is an ideal step toward providing personalized customer experiences.
AI-powered product recommendation is another aspect that eCommerce solutions providers must deliver on. Mobile-first design synchronized with virtual and augmented reality provides immersive and captivating experiences. Emerging technologies play a significant role in building trustworthiness and loyalty among customers. Here, we have a list of technologies and trends that will dominate the future of eCommerce.
Current eCommerce Trends:
Augmented Reality (AR): Customers are not happy with images alone. AR integration helps them feel the products, enhancing their willingness to use them.
Big Data Analytics: Analytics helps businesses deliver personalized customer experiences by recommending products and making futuristic predictions.
AI Chatbots: AI-powered chatbots enhance customers’ satisfaction by resolving their grievances and providing satisfactory answers to their queries.
Social Media Commerce: Organic sales could experience many hiccups, whereas social media commerce is a creative source to increase sales with eCommerce checkout.
One-click Purchase: Press one click from the product page to place your order. One-click checkout reduces CAR considerably.
Emerging Technologies or eCommerce
Voice Technology:
Typing is out, and voicing is in. Voice search and voice shopping save time and energy and enable customers to multitask while shopping.
Blockchain:
Blockchain ensures customers’ information is kept private and secure when paying online.
Drone Delivery:
Drone delivery reduces logistics costs and delivery time to enhance customers’ satisfaction levels multifold.
Emotion-spotting AI:
AI observes customers’ mood swings and expressions to offer personalized shopping experiences.
Livestream eCommerce:
This interactive shopping experience creates buzz by showcasing real-time products to judge and buy.
The Art of Customization: Building Your Unique eCommerce App
Benefits of Custom eCommerce Applications
“Convenience is demanded, and convenience is delivered” is the short story of eCommerce app development in 2024. A custom eCommerce app for sales has brought a paradigm shift in the online shopping world. Innovative products are sold through highly tailored eCommerce mobile apps equipped with AI and ML solutions, made interactive with RPA, and designed to be immersive with AR and VR solutions. Unlike off-the-shelf eCommerce solutions, tailored solutions are preferred as they address unique requirements and allow extensive innovations. Custom eCommerce app development has its benefits.
Personalized Experience: explicitly crafted for customers, eCommerce mobile apps are too responsive and interactive to customer behavior, fulfilling customer journeys with a sense of satisfaction.
Seamless Integration: The custom eCommerce app for sales connects easily with the existing system, making order and inventory management agile and data analysis smoother for forecasting.
Scalability for Growth: Custom eCommerce applications scale as your business grows. They are designed for the future, considering growing traffic, sales volumes, and financial needs.
Frictionless Checkout: Custom apps should have optimized checkout for online stores. Customers can buy the product with one click and pay online safely and securely, building trust in the brand.
Steps for custom eCommerce app development
Whether you are a Walmart or streetside store, if you are in the eCommerce sector, reluctance to digital transformation will cost you dearly. For eCommerce businesses, digital presence will be the only way to scale up and grow revenue. Therefore, embarking on a custom eCommerce app development journey is the way forward as it fulfills the business’s unique needs and allows businesses to meet customers’ expectations.
Businesses can outsource eCommerce app development or hire eCommerce app developers to craft intuitive, interactive, and immersive applications that drive your business toward sustainable growth. However, the question is how to build a unique eCommerce app. Let’s drive through the process.
Discovery & Planning:
This primary phase begins with defining and recognizing business goals. An eCommerce business should determine its target audience and pin down a value proposition. Afterward, you should observe and analyze the market, understand competitors, and identify strategic gaps. In the end, determine the functionalities your unique eCommerce app should have.
User Research & Analysis:
Once functionalities are decided, businesses should invest in understanding customer perspectives, market trends, consumer behavior, and business pain points. Determining these aspects helps businesses map the user journey to strengthen their functionalities and features and eliminate friction. The process also translates into more opportunities. Once user mapping is done, you can develop various customer personas to prepare a guide for feature design.
Information Architecture & Design:
Now, you are ready to employ eCommerce app developers to build viable wireframes to visualize the eCommerce app’s possible structure with critical functionalities and well-defined and well-articulated navigation. Post wireframes, UI/UX designers can craft a thoroughly user-friendly and visually captivating brand identity. Once the prototype is ready, it should be tested against user needs to refine the UI/UX design for optimum performance.
Development & Integration:
Your eCommerce app developers will meticulously build each functionality based on the technology stake you have chosen. They will integrate various APIs and third-party applications to make the app more secure, sustainable, and resilient. Once the MVP is developed, it will be integrated with your existing business processes and workflow in a secure environment.
Rigorous Testing & Refinement:
Application testing for quality assurance is critical to check the feasibility of the application on various metrics and parameters to evaluate the performance and future capability. It allows developers to recognize and rectify technical glitches, enhance loading speed, and improve navigation for smooth internal transition. A/B testing helps developers review multiple scenarios across functionalities to optimize them thoroughly.
Deployment & Maintenance:
Once deployed and tested, app store optimization should follow. This includes app listing and search engine optimization through keywords and meta to ensure users can discover the app quickly. Businesses should craft a marketing strategy that initially generates awareness about the eCommerce app and inbound leads later. The developers should simulate looking for bugs, providing security updates, and ensuring optimum maintenance.
Checkout Optimization: Converting Browsers into Buyers
70% cart abandonment rate is enough to discourage any eCommerce business. However, it is learned that the high CAR is due to multiple frictions that eCommerce businesses face. Reducing these friction points to nil and optimizing the checkout process can boost the business beyond the zenith.
There is no price for guessing; when customers have to follow fewer steps with simple navigation and quick checkout, the cart abandonment rate decreases significantly, translating into higher conversion rates and a surging bottom line.
Guest Checkout:
If an eCommerce business does not force customers to sign up and allows customers to checkout products as guests, the possibility of cart abandonment is reduced considerably. Mitigating one friction point can surge sales multifold.
Multiple Payment Options: Multiple payment options ensure customer convenience. Instead of just credit cards and PayPal, businesses should allow secure online payment using digital wallets and debit cards to avoid cart abandonment.
One-Click Purchasing: Customers who can select every product option on the product page and pay through a secure payment gateway in one click are less likely to abandon the cart, resulting in a higher retention rate.
Mobile-Friendly Design: Intuitive mobile design, mobile-optimized payment options, and simplified navigation attract customers to complete their shopping journey. Resultantly, businesses can build a loyal customer base.
Clear Progress Indicators: Eliminating uncertainty through transparency entices customers. Businesses must indicate how many steps away a customer is from checking out. This keeps customers engaged and improves purchase possibilities.
Vital Checkout Optimization Measures
Fort Knox Security:
Stonewalling customer information with SSL certificates behind a secure payment gateway enhances customers’ confidence in a brand. Trust badges aren’t just showpieces; they reassure customers that they are in a secure zone for online transactions. The robust security measures are silent sentinels that constantly stress data protection.
Mobile Marvels: Wallets & Autofill
Nobody has time in 2024, literally. Therefore, customers expect a speedy and convenient checkout process without getting entangled in credit card details and delivery addresses. The combination of digital wallet and autofill enables customers to quickly swoop in, sidestepping from filling lengthy forms. Customers can immediately check out products with a single tap. A simplified checkout is the winner today.
Feedback: The Secret Weapon
Post-checkout feedback from customers is an intelligent way to learn more about the checkout process and its bottlenecks and optimize it in real time. The checkout process functions in unison with the business; therefore, collaboration between customers and businesses is crucial for smooth checkout. Businesses can leverage this insight to refine the flow of the checkout process to ensure carts are not abandoned.
A/B Testing: The Checkout Chameleon
A/B testing stays at the heart of checkout optimization. Have you ever wondered why the checkout button is blue and not in any other color? A/B testing empowers businesses to compare various elements to future-proof conversions. Businesses with A/B testing can discern elements that align with a convenient checkout process. A/B testing is a reminder that businesses can’t settle for a “good enough” approach but have to be the best.
Conclusion
There are many ways businesses can increase their sales, but not all strategies involve customer satisfaction. Checkout optimization, which can easily be achieved by developing a custom eCommerce app, involves enhancing the bottom line as well as customer experiences. Cart abandonment is a direct result of a complex and lengthy checkout process and trust deficit. Businesses can easily optimize the checkout process by eliminating friction points to set a business on a bullet train track.
Author Bio:
Kinjal Soni is a professional blogger in a technology realm and a Digital Marketing expert at Sigma Solve, leading digital transformation services provider. She has been doing extensive research in emerging technologies and has written across AI, ML, Cloud Computing, Robotic Automation and related technology domains.
