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Essential features for steady success of your mobile app

The decision of building a mobile app for your e-commerce business is an indication that you are on the right track. If you understand that your customers look forward to seeing you adapt the latest technology, you are half way there.

However, entering the world of m-commerce is not enough. It will be unwise to imagine you can have a perfect mobile app that produces good revenue without exhibiting a set of essential features.

If you are building a WooCommerce mobile app with AppMySite’s free online app maker, you can efficiently get around including the right features.

If you have already built your app, it’s not too late to make amendments. A little improvement in your existing features can also make a world of difference.

Let’s look at some of the features that we have put together:

#1- Don’t compromise with product images 

The best way you can do justice to your products is showcasing them through high quality pictures. Besides taking high quality pictures, it is important that you also take a lot of them.

Rather than doing the job of clicking the pictures yourself, hire a professional photographer to do it for you. After all, this the only medium which will validate the look of your products.

Poor quality images will not only dissuade people from buying your products but will also be detrimental for your brand’s reputation.

Products that have most pictures will automatically sell more, considering they will look more credible than otherwise.

Rather than including a fewer pictures with no details, it is ideal that you include numerous features that can also be zoomed in and zoomed out.

Once the customers has also the details of the products, including a picture of every angle of the product, the packing, and other minute details, it will be easier for them to make a decision.

Unlike brick and mortar store, where customers can physically pick up items, feel the material, examine it from every angle and try it on, online shopping is only backed by a detailed description and a variety of high definition images.

You don’t want to drive customers away because they don’t trust your product.

#2- Add detailed descriptions of all products

In the first section of this post, we discussed how using multiple images that are also high-definition, can help increase the chances of conversion. In the same light, product description are as important as product images.

A detailed description that specifies the measurement, material, colour and other variations will give your app users an exact idea of the product.

The only thing you want to keep in mind is ensuring the content is easy to understand. If you indulge in fancy writing with difficult words, you may just end up confusing the customer more.

The content should be easy to grasp, which is only possible if you write them in bullet points. Keep the selection of your words very simple.

#3- Offer a bespoke experience to customers 

Personalisation is the key to maintaining long term relationship with your customers. And it is not very challenging to keep your regular customers close provided they feel valued.

You can take your first step towards personalisation by letting customers create a profile on your app and maintaining it by editing their profile image, addresses, phone numbers and more.

This not only makes the customers feel attached to the app but also gives you an insight of their personal information including their location, age and gender. This data can be put to good use to offer tailor-made offers to a set of loyal customers.

Besides asking for basic details, request customers to add information which will help you improvise further. Include analytics as a part of your mobile app that helps track customer behaviour. You can easily use the data to know their preferences and send them offers for products they may be genuinely interested in.

To offer a bespoke shopping platform to your customers, you can also allow them to mark their favourite items or add it to their cart for as long as they like for a purchase later on. 

#4- Promote products with special offers 

Product promotion

Customers are happier to buy a product on sale than not. The quench of buying a products on promotion is greater than buying it when it’s new in.

So why not give the customers what they really want? Instead of using the old technique of bumping the original prices and then implementing a sale, go with something more genuine.

You can always have products on sale that don’t sell well. You would rather make some money on a failed collection than not make money at all.

It is important that you take your promotions as seriously as you take the launch of your new collection. You can go till the extend of introducing a new section on your app dashboard that is dedicated to sales.

Change your splash screen every now and then to promote your sales and to inform your customers.

#5- Make navigation completely effortless

The very reason apps exist is the shortage of timing in the present times. People find it hard to sit themselves down on a system, to browse through websites which is why apps started gaining popularity.

To further enhance user experience, you can work towards crafting a dashboard that is extremely easy to navigate. Primarily, it is important that you declutter elements that are not important and move away customer’s focus.

Secondly, streamline your primary menu, secondary menu and footer. Overloading the dashboard will be too much for a screen so small. Keep it simple by including categories that are critical.

Another trick is to make a search bar available. There will always be customers looking for specific products, where smart search bar will come handy. Just adding a search bar that doesn’t help customers when they don’t type in the exact name of the product will also not be resourceful. Optimize your products by adding all possible tags with your products to make them easily discoverable.

#6- Integrating social media with your shopping app

You will hardly come across smart phone users who are not hooked to their social media. By integrating social media with your mobile app, you will be taking another step towards creating a user-friendly environment for your users.

For instance: if your users can simply use their Facebook account to sign up with your app or log in using it, they will never have to set their passwords again.

In addition to making it easy for customers to login and sign up, this will also bump up the onboarding process. It’s a win-win for both you and your customers.

Moreover, think of all the data that you can fetch from the social media profiles of your app users once they sign in from their personal accounts.

#7- Put that data into good use 

There is no better option to succeed than to know what your customer wants. If you understand your customer preferences, selling will be a much easier process.

Integrating a real-time reporting system that constantly gives you information of the products that are performing well and the ones that are not, can make a world of difference.

Furthermore, your analytics must also keep you informed of the app’s performance. If you know the number of times your app crashes and what causes it to do so, you can fix it instantly for a seamless customer experience.

The last thing you want is your existing app users to uninstall your app because of its low performance. If you know where the problem lies, you can always improvise.

#8- Make the checkout process completely effortless 

The most critical part of shopping is the checkout process. More than 74 percent people abandon their carts, and don’t convert into actual sales even though this is the last leg of their shopping process.

There are several measures that you can take to ensure your customers don’t abandon their carts. For instance, when you ask customers to create their profile, you can also save their billing details. This will save them the time and effort from entering it over and over again.

If customers are choosing mobile apps over responsive websites, there must be a strong reason behind it. It is the experience they go after. Unlike responsive websites, people prefer apps because they are faster.

The most basic aspect of your checkout process is that it should take the least time possible. This is a time when a customer may re-evaluate their decision and abandon the entire cart.

It is best to ensure your checkout process is as smooth and as frictionless as possible.

#9- Integrate multiple payment gateways 

Accepting payments from multiple channels will only broaden your customer base. Some customers prefer credit card, while some may want to use a wallet or a debit cart.

Taking in account petty problem like high transaction fee or additional taxes will only limit your reach to the customers and restrict your sales. Remember what we said in the last section, frictionless processes are always better for conversions.

Taking in popular payments gateways such as credit card, debit card, eallets, Cash on Delivery is the most basic you can do.

If you are processing orders globally, it is best if you introduce almost as many payment gateways as possible. Most payments fall through credit card which is a must.

You can also integrate payments gateways such as PayPal or CC Avenue that will make the customers feel more secured.

#10- Create a secure network for the app users

If you are heading towards personalisation, you must ensure that you are securing customer’s information and assuring them that you will protect it too. A shopping app, especially, should be protected more securely than blog/news apps.

You don’t want your customers to feel edgy giving you sensitive information such as their home/office addresses or card details.

Don’t shy away from announcing to the customers that their personal information is completely protected on your shopping app. You can explicitly display this information on your checkout screen, as that is where the customer will need reassurance.

You can also take safety measures to ensure their payment details are partially hidden even if someone does get hands on it. For instance: almost all companies prefer showing only the last 4 digit of the card rather than displaying it entirely.

#11- Send push notification for better communication 

You can always expect customers to log in to your app and start looking for new collection or promotions. If you really want to grab their attention, a little more than waiting will be required.

Mobile apps are capable of deploying the most powerful marketing tool to stay in touch with their customers at all times, push notifications.

Push notifications are probably the best technique to motivate customers and inform them of your promotions, new collections and season sales. The best part about push notifications is that you can schedule them according to the customer behaviour and send a blast to them in groups.

While push notifications are a great innovation to stay connected to the customer, it is important that you don’t overdo it. Your app users want to be notified when there is something significant happening.

Sending too many notification will only get on their nerves, causing them to eventually restrict you to send them notification ever again.

Wrapping up 

In this post, we discussed a set of critical features, which will be an eminent part of your success. You may feel overthrown by so much information but the good news is that you can build an app with AppMySite’s WooCommerce mobile app builder with all the features we discussed and in an affordable budget.

You can start by building an app for free and testing it on a real device. Convert your website into app to enjoy premium features for your shopping app.

 

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