Ecommerce apps are a critical aspect of any business trying to expand its online footprint. Ecommerce represents the current shopping trends, and it’s important to be familiar with the best ecommerce app solutions on the market. This article will give you a brief overview of what some of the best ecommerce apps currently are, as well as some features to expect from these platforms.
Finding the best ecommerce app solution for your business comes down to three things: functionality, security, and support. Choosing the wrong platform can be disastrous for your business. But finding the right platform for your business ensures a happier clientele and keeps you ahead of the game in terms of sales and marketing.
There are thousands of ecommerce apps available in the market, so how do you know which of them are best suited for your business? What’s more, only a few ecommerce apps will be right for you. You can’t just pick any random package and expect it to perform at its best. To get the most value out of your app, you need to invest in the right one.
We are offering the best ecommerce app solutions to manage your online store. Our goal is to make these apps available as you need them (see a full list below). We want to help you build better apps by offering the tools you need, when you need them.
Why you need eCommerce applications for your business?
According to statista.com, the number of consumers who will be making digital means to shop for their essentials will be exceeding 65% by 2021. This alone is a good reason enough for you to switch our business to e-commerce applications. Another reason is that by the end of this year, almost 75% of the US population is bound to be smartphone users.
Well, if you are still not convinced. Then we have a bagful of reasons to impress you on the need to make a move towards a robust e-commerce mobile app.
A well-fitting e-commerce app will give you a cutting-edge over your competitors. It does so through by providing :
1. Mobility
You cannot take your store from one town to another, but you can definitely refer a mobile app from one smartphone user to another. And that is possible with a simple share button from the USA to Japan, from Finland to Papua New Guinea within seconds. This is the power of mobile apps. It adds infinite mobility to your store small or big, size just doesn’t matter at all.
2. One-to-One Marketing
Before the progress in the e-commerce app development, it was impossible to think that you can market to every person in a town personally. But today it is possible. The other side of this is that you can target the customer one to one. New analytic tools like Big Data and others in the stream help you reward, persuade, and win customers who are most loyal to you and impress new ones as well.
3. Faster Payment
E-commerce apps come with integrated features like in-app payments. The digital banking boom and m-banking in particular is the new style of paying the debts. An e commerce app will help your customers get easy refunds and pay you faster. A surprise cashback offer kicks off best when it is an app that gives them the good news!!!
4. Fit to Need
How often can you arrange the things in your shopping complex? Maybe in a year, at max quarterly. Imagine you can do it every week or if your resources permit even daily. A new look awaits your customers every single day. Well, this happens only in a mobile app. The feedback you receive can be turned into actions to show how responsive to customers you are. What can be a better way to build brand loyalty?
Refersion
You can use Refersion to manage and track your ambassador, influencer, and affiliate marketing. It easily integrates with many popular eCommerce portals, making it simple for you to track any digital sale your affiliates (or indeed influencers) make. If you use more obscure eCommerce software, you can instead use Refersion’s pixel to track your affiliate orders.
Refersion customers gain automatic access to the Refersion Marketplace, an open network of affiliate partners actively looking to partner with merchants. Merchants begin by creating an offer in their Refersion account. If the offer is attractive enough, compared to the competition, you should have potential affiliates contacting you wanting to sell your products. You follow a similar process if you’re looking for influencers for a campaign. In addition, you can automate much of the process, including giving approvals for affiliates and orders.
Helium 10
Helium 10 claims to provide everything you need to sell on Amazon, meaning that if that is your marketplace, Helium 10 will help your eCommerce store management in multiple ways. Although we list Helium 10 under Product Sourcing, you will find uses for it in many more ways.
Helium 10 incorporates a treasure trove of tools, so you can easily select the best tool for a particular job. It categorizes its tools into Product Research, Keyword Research, Listing Optimization, Operations, Analytics, Marketing, and Finance. Helium 10 has built tools to assist you along every step of your seller journey.
It lists six tools for Product Research alone:
- Black Box – search through over 450 million products in seconds
- Trendster – view a product’s sales trends, demand, and seasonality in one intelligent display
- X-Ray – choose your product confidently with transparent information, including revenue estimates, sales trends, and price
- Profitability Calculator – estimate your product’s profitability with integral product data, like dimensions, FBA fees, and freight costs
- Review Insights – quickly aggregate customer insights with instant review downloads
- ASIN Grabber – instantaneously pull hundreds of product ASINs for in-depth product research
Jungle Scout
Jungle Scout helps you start, grow, and manage a business on Amazon. You can use Jungle Scout to make data-driven decisions and build a profitable Amazon business.
You can buy one of three plans:
- Basic ($19/mo.) – the essentials for jumpstarting your product research and Amazon business. You can track three products.
- Suite ($49/mo.) – all the Basic features plus Review Automation, the ability to add more users, access to more in-depth historical product and keyword data, the ability to track 150 products, plus advanced seller features
- Professional ($84/mo.) – all the Suite features plus you can track up to 1000 ASINs, use six months of historical data in Product Tracker and two years of historical keyword data, and the ability to track 1,000 products. You can include six users in this plan.
Magento
Magento helps design and build mobile-ready solutions for different sized retail businesses – big, small, or medium. Vendors can build custom mobile stores with various responsive themes that offer individual user displays using Magento’s mobile commerce platform.
It offers a mobile-friendly checkout and integrates with various payment gateways allowing vendors to receive and accept mobile orders on the go. Magento also serves PWA (progressive web apps), which helps build mobile sites with the ease of mobile apps as well as desktop site searchability. ‘Mobile optimization initiatives’ is one of Magento’s many virtues, helping vendors who use Magento to improve their mobile experience. Magento’s mobile commerce platform also offers Magento App Builders, extensions that empower businesses to create their company’s mobile apps.
However, drawback or not, most people argue that these extensions are a temporary solution and accompany multiple issues. In addition, they do not replicate all of the Magento store’s features and do not mimic any customizations made. Also, most of the app builder extensions are compatible with a handful of Magento versions. Community and business editions are both separate, making it impossible to have a seamless experience.
If you find yourself swimming in doubt, consider this, Magento is trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands including Ford, Landrover, and Nestle Nespresso. Brownie point, not only you can build fully native Android applications for your Magento eCommerce store, but with Magento’s mobile commerce builder you can also integrate it with your custom-built mobile commerce apps.
Shopify
Shopify enables businesses to sell via mobile devices by empowering retail businesses of all kinds to design and develop mobile responsive themes that thrive on screens of all sizes. With encrypted mobile carts, the mobile checkout is aimed at making payments on mobile devices convenient.
Shopify’s mobile commerce solution allows you to manage your store website on-the-go, allowing you to have an instant view of your products, order history, customer information, and even sales statistics in depth – all from your smartphone device. However, Shopify’s mobile solution was more of an afterthought, it originally wasn’t part of the bigger plan Hence, Shopify’s architecture has certain issues quite often reported by the users working on mobile sites. Moreover, since Shopify is centered on apps and extensions developed by individual third-party providers, users complain that the same problems can occur with any mobile extension.
What’s more, with its iOS and Android buy SDK – a library of native classes and routines – Shopify allows both, the Android and iOS developers, to embed Shopify’s eCommerce functionality directly into a native mobile app for a seamless customer experience.
Shopify’s mobile eCommerce platform also empowers third-party mobile app developers that convert your Shopify store into mobile apps however, these are paid and require syncing with your main store to project all the alterations and customizations.
Shopify is powering more than 500 businesses at present, some big and famous names leveraging this eCommerce platform include BBC, RedBull, The Economist, and the Penguin Books.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce mobile app solution allows vendors to manage their online stores on the go from anywhere at all as well as view business stats in real-time. WooCommerce enables vendors to sell on mobile leveraging built-in tools and plugin-based solutions to make their site mobile-ready. There is a wide spectrum of extensions to help optimize photos or make your website mobile-ready. In addition to converting your default store into a mobile store, some of these plugins also transform it into a quasi-mobile app, hence, it’s one of our 5 best eCommerce platforms.
WooCommerce offers a plethora of mobile app development plugins and extensions to help you design mobile apps for your WooCommerce store. Albeit, these extensions are paid, and you are still required to select one that best fits your retail business requirements. If you are a one-man show, you have to hire an IT team for overall maintenance as well as manage hosting and any updates as WooCommerce is self-hosted. While opting to create or transform your web-store into a mobile app with these plugins may seem easier, they are hardly personalized and with very little room for customization. While outsourcing your mobile commerce app solution to a mobile app development company may seem fancier or expensive, it is definitely worth a shot in the long run. You can always have your custom-built app integrated with WooCommerce or any other eCommerce platform you have in mind.
What’s more, it’s trusted by some of the biggest names in the industry including Weber, AeroPress, and Singer.
HubSpot Mobile
HubSpot CRM is everything you need to organize, track, and nurture your leads and customers. And the best part is that it’s 100% free, forever.
Having access to your CRM while on the go will make your life a whole lot easier. If you’re out networking, you can turn business cards into new CRM contacts thanks to the business card scanner feature. No need to worry about losing that piece of carton.
The most useful ecommerce function is live chat. With live chat on your phone, you can exceed both your customers’ and potential customers’ expectations by giving them the help they need, whenever they need it. You don’t need to make them wait anymore.
Google Analytics
Tracking page views, interactions, and click rates are second nature to ecommerce business owners. Google Analytics helps you figure out which parts of your website and marketing strategy are driving the most conversions. This app lets you track your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns as well as sign ups from different platforms and search engines. This free app is critical for helping you determine a successful strategy for the upcoming months.
People who do business online use the Facebook app for a variety of reasons. Facebook is a great place to advertise sales, boost brand awareness, and respond to questions quickly on your business’s fan page. With this app, you can easily offer online customer service by responding to comments, whether they are negative or positive. Keeping customers engaged is the name of the game in building brand loyalty.
WordPress
The WordPress app is great for ecommerce business owners who are always on the run. Now you can use your mobile device to update your website with breaking news, new photos, and blog posts. Thanks to the app’s social media plugins, you can even alert your followers to new website updates as you make them. WordPress is user-friendly, so even the technically challenged can have a website that looks like it was built by an expert.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows business owners to see everything going on with their company’s social media feeds. This makes answering questions, responding to comments, and engaging with customers easy. As many business owners know, a well-developed social media presence can do wonders with cultivating a community and generating repeat customers. This also allows you to schedule your tweets and Facebook posts in advance, making social media easier than ever. Hootsuite allows you to schedule days, weeks, or even months of posts at a time, making your social media manager’s job much less difficult.
Apps are plentiful in online business today, and if you’re not using the best ones for your business, you could already be behind your competition. From organization to process optimization to social media to analytics, there’s something to help every business person get ahead. These myriad apps help ecommerce business owners stay connected, competitive, and engaged, all of which are increasingly critical in today’s mobile business world.
How eCommerce apps help your business grow?
It is quite simple since we have examined the fragments surrounding an ecommerce application closely. All you need to do is put it together, add one to one, and then you have the answer. Allow us to assist in making things more transparent.
The Internet must have simplified many things, but the basic tenets of prudent marketing never change — the basic principles of marketing the 4 Ps viz. Product, Price, Promotion, and Place remains the same. The 4Ps are called the marketing mix, and more your business adheres to it more successful it’s going to be.
#1. Inform to Impress
What strikes you the most when you use an e commerce application?
The way you see the products. Right?
The way it is displayed the information about the product and the feeling that you are reading valuable information.
Marketing Mix Angle: Takes care of the first P i.e., the Product. Informs customers about the features and specialties of your products.
Takes care of the first P i.e., the Product. Informs customers about the features and speciallties of your products.
#2. Cut Your Cost
The next spot where an e-commerce app can strengthen your business is by cutting your budget. As we saw in the many examples above, a mobile app once created lets; you modify your e-commerce store without much ado. The cost of changing a brick and mortar physical store is quite lofty when compared to a simple design switch. Further, it lets you save on the staff, rent, advertising, etc.
Marketing Mix Angle: It lets you cut on the external costs to offer your product at a more competitive price to your customers.
#3. Customer Satisfaction
Nothing works for brand building than wooing your target customers. And who doesn’t like yummy offers?
An e-commerce app lets you provide many value-added services to consumers. For example, Google Pay conducts gaming to engage and promote its payment solution through cleverly designed tasks. Many e-commerce apps like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, etc. use Christmas, Halloween, and other special days to offer freebies and offers.
Marketing Mix Angle : It takes care of the third P i.e., Promotion of the marketing mix. The marketing aspects can be most effectively channeled to the targeted customers through mobile apps.
#4. People are Mobile
Studies have established this again and again. People are now mobile and once you invent an easy way the mind takes you there unconsciously.
Just consider this example, you are in a hurry, and you want to add proteins to your breakfast; unfortunately, you don’t have any eggs on your shelf. The nearest store is about a mile away, and the grocery app gets you eggs in a few clicks. Once you get the eggs from your favorite grocery delivery app, next time you run out of a grocery, you are getting your smartphone quite naturally. That’s the thing with the mind. Easy is right, and right is easy. No wonder every grocery service today needs a mobile app in the USA.
The story of InstaShop is inspiring for hundreds of startups across the world for InstaShop leveraged this mobile tendency of the Millenials in UAE.
Marketing Mix Angle: The fourth P, Place, is taken care of here. Instead of locating production units here and there, you are taking it to a customer’s home, to the very place he is right now.
Some other mobile app development trends like virtual reality apps, scan on-the-go apps, etc. are defining e-commerce applications. Check out the AR(Augmented Reality) integrated L’OReal Paris app. One is sure to download this app just for the fun of it.
Conclusion
Users are increasingly turning to their smartphones and tablets to buy online. This is the reason why ecommerce apps development has become so popular in recent years. If you have plans of launching an ecommerce website or upgrading your existing website, it’s evident that you need a powerful mobile-first ecommerce app solution to accommodate your business needs.
Believe it or not, your mobile phone is one of the most powerful online marketing tools at your disposal. You can use this to your advantage by using an ecommerce app solution to optimize your business and successfully reach new consumers via mobile devices.The eCommerce mobile app for your business is the perfect solution to reach out to a wider user base and offer them great buying experience.