Ecommerce has become a rich, enticing landscape for businesses and app development companies alike. Online retail commerce is an ever blossoming industry, booming with average annual growth is estimated to reach $3 billion by 2019.
Of all active ecommerce portals, Amazon is the one reaching one million customers within 27 months of its launch.
In the US, Amazon earned the appreciative market reputation of being the most valuable retailer, surpassing Walmart in market capitalization in 2015.
This is mainly attributed to the fact that online shopping app users feel more content with their purchases than traditional retail shop experience.
Read Also: How to Create a Retail App Like Walmart
Therefore, people rush flooding to ecommerce market for promising business opportunities. But create an app like Amazon means going up against the fierce competition.
When looked from developer’s standpoint, mobile apps are passed through several crucial stages of Agile methodology to make sure the final product is what you initially envisioned.
Here, keeping Amazon’s boundless success in mind, we are going to walk you through important stages and key ingredients to create an astounding e-commerce app like Amazon.
Conduct Market Research
The first thing to kick-start your market research with is identifying the app users’ requirements and their reason for engaging with your business.
Accordingly, approach the developers with your firm thoughts on the type of products you want to serve customers with. Your thorough research will help you sort out what your specialized goods are along with their digital presentation tactics.
Usually, the entire scope of market research involves:
- Product features
- The target audience requirements
- Insight into business operations of Competitors
- Trending facts and interests
- Success boosters
- MVP basics
- Scalability solutions
Delve a little deeper into how other existing apps and brands sell goods online which are similar to yours. This will give you a good idea on essential features, presentation skills, creative ideas and more, the elements that actually worked for their online business and what is no longer needed.
Amazon’s Success Boosters: Original Features
If we take a look into the Amazon’s dazzling success, you will be amazed at the volume of sales, repeat customers and customer satisfaction level they acquired.
They started as an online bookstore which was then astonishingly transformed into the most successful ecommerce app.
Scalable and versatile, Amazon transcended beyond the biggest database of books and now offers appreciable discounts on many of its titles, which becomes one of the efficacious tricks to attract eternal customer loyalty.
In its early version of Bookstore, Amazon had a powerful search engine plus vast categories of products to help customers make right purchase decisions.
Its recommendation center allowed customers to buy books matching their tastes, mood and reading preferences, etc.
Read also : 10 Best Shopping Apps in UK
Amazon has gift parcel options and automatic notification and shipment tracking system. Users’ ability to read and share ratings and reviews augmented its popularity as ecommerce customers rely on product reviews far more than their descriptions.
Pick and Choose Features of Value
If you want to create an app like Amazon, your first instinct should be not to exactly imitate all of Amazon features but to sculpt a solid and competitive architecture of an e-retailer app that stands out among all other online shopping apps.
Therefore, launching an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) through rapidly Mobile App Development (RMAD) with all the essential features is an approach never regretted. These features include:
User log-in/registration
As clichéd as it sounds, it is important to remember that login process is the gateway to your app’s inner personality. This is why it needs to be pleasant, easy and user-oriented; this is where user experience actually begins.
With that note in mind, users should never be asked to provide loads of personal information before they explore and browse the insides as guests to make sure the app is worthwhile. To make the journey easy, allow them to use social sign-in options such as Facebook and Twitter.
Product Search
Just like Amazon search, your product search must be super fast, responsive and keyword-sensitive, having a host of filters and precise indexing. Doing this will help users get close to their products-in-search in no time.
Effortless Navigation
The way users find, browse and switch between pages and menu options must be made smooth and effortless. Your product category titles and service offerings should be comprehensible enough for users to navigate through.
Minimum-Resistance Checkout Pages
The biggest nightmare retailers face is the ambush of checkout content. Not matter how enthusiastically users load their carts with favorite items, online shopping market research often hints that nearly 70% of cart-filling instances result in abandonment. To avoid such horrid debacles, make sure:
- Guest users find it easy and fast to purchase without mandatory login and account creation. Keeping heavy registration steps at checkout threshold would be a deterrent factor to a thick volume of potential customers.This is why they should be able to log-in using social media accounts.
- Maintain the simplicity of the checkout page. Don’t overwhelm first-time customers with unnecessary questions and confusing options.
- To keep it all transparent, show users a clean checkout progress where they can see how many steps are left before reaching the order confirmation page. Customer psychology favors the knowledge of how much time to spend prior to obtaining what they want.
User Reviews
This simple feature directly impacts sales as it reflects customers sharing their experience about the app and products. Let users see all types of reviews because they trust user reviews more than product descriptions.
A Reliable and Safe Payment Gateway
Payment gateway does the job of sending the transactions to bank’s processing systems. Due to involvement of sensitive data, the payment gateway feature must be safe, secure and trusted.
Using well reputed systems such as PayPal and Stripe could be worth consideration as they are popularly chosen for assured transactions.
Shipping
Amazon’s success also exudes from the generous network of warehouses that enabled prompt delivery of items ordered. As users upfront expect lightning-fast free shipment delivery, it will do good if your product page inform users of time and price of the shipment.
Additionally, make shipping forms user-friendly and clean with multiple inputs and clear entry fields.
Other Features That Matter Later:
- Real-time order tracking
- Wish list
- AR product view
- Live chat support
- Push notifications
- Social media integration
Prepare a Sharp and Professional Design Logic
Having a unique, unforeseen design idea could be a powerful game changer for your app. Not only does it generate positive impression, but it also equally acts as a customer-magnet. Also, the design visuals remain mostly accountable for users’ overall opinions.
Read also : Best Online Shopping Apps
This is why it is vital to focus on fusing the basic elements of templates with a fresh professional layer of design that contributes to enhancing the brand recognition.
Design a Logo With Clarity:
Since your app logo is the first thing customers notice before downloading it, it is the only chance to create an irresistible first impression. You can try to match Amazon’s style of logo that clearly displays brand name, representative colors and a shopping cart.
Make a Remarkable Layout:
Users will entertain no misapprehension in the matter of crafting the app layout. Their eyes remember 80% of the information in its visual form and the rest in written text. Create a perfect layout for an app in which product pictures stand out from the background. For this to happen, you must emphasize:
- White and plain background
- High quality pictures
- Captures from different angles
- Large photos to grab attention
- Zoomed view
Choose The Mobile Platform
The next stage involves deciding on mobile platforms for launching the app. This can essentially be the part of your marketing research for knowing the preferences of your target consumers across target geographies across the world.
Certain developed countries like North America and Europe prefer iOS whereas the rest relies on Android. From the eyes of developers, iOS development looks easier and less time-consuming as it demands optimizing the app only for the recent versions of Apple devices.
Android development involves more time and complexities as developers need to optimize fora wide range of devices and screen resolutions. To expedite the Android development process, you can opt for only the most popular Android devices.
Since Android devices are diverse and have captured a huge global market, building the Android app is hugely profitable. You can also opt for a cross-platform approach targeting both platforms at once.
Conclusion
Create an app like Amazon sounds much more viable, economical and faster than building a web application for online shopping that is expected to be responsive.
Amazon’s exponential success is the best inspiration if you are embarking on an ecommerce business. Contact the right ecommerce app development company and do your research in advance to identify the niche market and target audience.
The next, follow the above steps to achieve the objective. Keep improving your product after launching the MVP with new updates and innovations. The rest depends on how the development process goes on to create such an app like Amazon.
