We buy a gift for a friend on the way to work, order new sneakers for the treadmill at the gym, buy a long-awaited e-book over a cup of coffee in a café and start reading it. People are used to being mobile and realizing their requests immediately. The era of consumption can become meaningful, tomorrow the housewife will choose meditation candles instead of a new dress. None of this will change the fact that the consumer prefers to use apps for shopping. The pandemic and the redistribution of time resources have led society to the habit of being in a comfortable and convenient environment where everything we need will be brought right to our houses.
If a business doesn’t want to lose most of its customers or expand its positioning, it needs to look toward e-commerce app development. This will provide the following benefits:
- Reduce the cost of attracting customers
- Conduct user behavior analysis and test marketing strategies
- Turn the store into a 24/7 business, allowing the user to shop at their convenience and you to make a profit no matter what time of day it is
- Become closer to the customer, be visible all the time
- Your business is facing a market of 4.8 billion smartphone users
That sounds like a very exciting prospect. But where there are pros, there are cons. In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at e-commerce application development cost.
Which Place to Take?
First and foremost, you determine what you will sell and for whom. In e-commerce app development, there are several options. Let’s break down the main areas by the type of target audience.
- Business-to-business. When your company produces powerful servers and other hardware for the needs of IT companies.
- Business-to-consumer. It’s all about the variety of online stores and marketplaces, like Amazon.
- Business-to-government. Let’s say you have a factory for making uniforms. Accordingly, you can work with many municipal and government agencies. This can be electronic bidding and government contracts.
- Consumer-to-consumer. The electronic boards with the announcements.
- Government-to-citizens. You decide to pay taxes, fines send a request to government agencies, all of these issues will solve special e-commerce app development.
Where to look for profit?
The story of a consumer’s relationship with a brand is not much different from a real romance. The more properly you start the candy-coated period, the better the chance that the connection will become serious and sincere. It is in your store that they will order a tablecloth for a birthday, curtains for a new home, and a gift for a daughter. You can grow and develop with your client. People are susceptible to emotion, they look for new things when the existing result is not comfortable and becomes obsolete. Your job is to turn the user into a regular. Don’t forget that it’s 5 times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to keep the one you’ve already worked with.
The goal of any digital project is to make a profit, whether directly or indirectly, such as gaining customer trust and loyalty. So after you’ve analyzed the idea of an e-commerce app development, move on to the functionality and monetization phase.
- The e-commerce app development should be usable and with an attractive design. For this, it is important to study the experience of competitors and create a user-friendly interface. Think about the user at the time of prototype development. Then, that very first impression will create a WOW effect. The customer doesn’t want to search and compare, when he has a quality product in his hands in terms of usage.
- Assuming the application is already in the user’s smartphone, now you need to gently remind him of it. Use promotions, loyalty programs, retargeting, and deliver that information through Push notifications. It should be unobtrusive, show concern and offer benefits.
- Don’t forget the constant upgrades. More advanced versions of operating systems come out, the same thing gets boring to the user. So part of the budget should be spent on maintaining and updating your e-commerce app development. Your product has to be up-to-date and meet the user’s needs.
- You can go international if you create a product in several languages. As you know, AppStore and Google play are available all over the world. This opens up new opportunities for your business.
- Also don’t forget about such monetization opportunities as advertising, commission per transaction if you create an aggregator, paid subscriptions, for trading items of intellectual labor, and selling additional premium services within the app.
- Enhanced security. Users appreciate that in e-commerce app development, founders are careful to protect personal data.
- A recommendation system based on artificial intelligence. When algorithms analyze shopping habits and suggest ideal products that can interest the user.
E-commerce app development is important for businesses because it is an independent sales channel that adapts to each customer. The app provides an average check 120%-137% higher than with websites and their adaptive versions.
How to save money on development?
As you understand, e-commerce app development is not a simple task. At first glance, it seems that the cost depends on the price of an hour of specialist’s work. But here it is worth getting into details. In Australia this rate is around $80, in India it is $25, in the USA it is $100. Also, an important point is whether you hire a professional development team or freelancers. Small savings on employees can turn out to be a failure. Single professionals have not worked and interacted with each other before your project. You can’t be sure of their qualifications and ability to get the job done on time.
Here’s the first way to reduce costs. Choose a reliable team located in Eastern Europe. Pay attention in this case to experience, portfolio, time zones and language skills.
E-commerce app development takes place for 2 operating systems iOS and Android. On the one hand, you can launch it for only one platform, but you lose a significant part of the audience. Especially now there are frameworks that can create and update apps for both operating systems at once.
Design is an essential part of creating a product. It significantly affects the cost of the project as a whole. The more research and analysis of user experience will be done, the more convenient and intuitive the product will be for the user. And the right combination of colors and fonts will make it stand out from the competition.
Understanding the original idea of the project, you prescribe the basic and additional functionality. There is a direct correlation with the cost. The basic ones are
- searching for products in the catalog
- adding to cart
- checkout and payment
- user authorization in the personal cabinet
So an experienced development team will advise you to start with MVP to check the viability of your idea, get feedback during testing and make conclusions about further e-commerce app development.
It’s also worth budgeting for post-launch support and administration. More often than not, it is 25% of the project cost.
It may seem that the cost of e-commerce app development is high and unjustified. If that were true, the owner of Amazon would not be the richest man on the planet.