Retail App Development: 5 Reasons to Create One for Your Business

In fact, hundreds of brands already made use of the opportunity and successfully adapted retail mobile apps. That's why we decided to shed some light on this topic and show you several ways of how your company can benefit from an app.

If you're reading this post, it means you already see the perspectives of apps in business and probably seek for mobile app development services. Going forward, we should say that any retail business is able to benefit from a mobile solution if to plan out a strategy and tailor the app in accordance with the needs of your target audience. In case you're still in doubts whether you need an app if you already have a profitable website, let's take a look at dry statistics.

According to eMarketer research, the number of annual sales in m-commerce segment grows by 5% to 10%. Sure thing, it's not enough just to attract customers to your digital store (be it a website or retail mobile application), you should also motivate them to purchase something. If we take a look at statistics of retail mobile apps in comparison to websites, we'll see the following:

• Mobile shoppers tend to browse 286% more goods if compared to mobile websites.
• Retail mobile apps generate 90% higher add-to-basket rate in comparison to mobile websites.
• Total conversion rate on mobile apps is 120% higher if compared to retail websites.

These statistics provided by PR Newswire, clearly shows that mobile apps for retail industry are able to engage customers better than websites and generate more profit for business holders.

Except for everything I've already said, there is one more reason to think about retail software development services. There are about 2 billion of active smartphone users each of whom is your potential customer.

As you understand, demand generates supply and in order to compete, you should adapt your business to customers' preferences.

If you still feel a lack of reasons to implement your own application for retail business, let's then dive deeper and consider separate scenarios on how you can benefit from it.

Well, back to numbers. The survey conducted by Apptentive indicates that 88% of customers downloading retail mobile apps actually use them. Moreover, 54% of interviewed people said they made a purchase there in the last month. By the way, if resort to different kinds of loyalty programs and other marketing tricks, you can even outperform this result.

This way, such retail platform as Alibaba gets the highest profit ($24 monthly per an active mobile user) from mobile shoppers.

Look around and you'll see that many medium-sized and even small companies in automation in retail already have an app or working on it's creation. The report by ContactIQ proves it showing that 62% of respondents are about to release a retail software application or already rolled out one.

Such a tendency clearly shows that customers over the globe are fond of the idea to purchase goods through eye-catching and easy-to-use native apps instead of mobile version of websites. The market dictates it's own rules and you risk to lose a big piece of cake. Why? 46% of people interviewed in AYTM's survey said they prefer purchasing through retail mobile apps than on websites.

This bunch of people may choose another store that already has it's own retail store app. I suppose that you don't want to lose all these customers. The best way to avoid it is to try to meet their preferences and needs.

Retail mobile apps can serve not only for achieving certain financial goals but for building brand loyalty as well. Many big companies develop their apps for this reason.

Loyalty programs can bring your customers everything they love -- special offers of different kinds. Let's consider a couple of the most popular solutions that brands endow it's retail apps with in order to generate more loyal customers.

As I already said, retail mobile apps open up the doors to hundreds of thousands of potential customers. Guys from Apptentive decided to shed some light on this question. In accordance to their report, retail apps are in active use among both men and women -- 44% and 56% respectively. Meanwhile, the average salary of retail apps users ranges between $50,00 to $75,000 annually.

Talking about age, the age category of 18-29 years old prevails as expected and holds 27% of the total users. Surprisingly, the second largest age category is 60+ years old that holds 26% of the total number of retail apps' users.

51% of clients use retail store mobile applications while purchasing stuff in physical stores, so if you guess that your app and store are something incompatible -- you're wrong since they're rather parts of the same whole. Bearing this thought in mind, you are able to make them interact and work together. Underneath, we've placed several features borrowed within diverse retail app development solutions which may help you to come up with your own ideas or just polish the existing ones.

We've already provided you with the list of retail app features that are used by other companies. It's time to dive deeper into this features, consider closely several more of them, and give you more piece of advice.

One of the main reasons why customers strive to use apps instead of websites for shopping is the well-organized and convenience catalogues of goods. That's why you should take care of your app's UI/UX design in general and the attractiveness of the catalogue in particular. Here are several plain tips on how to make your catalogues better:

• Use only high-quality photos of goods
• Write detailed description to products
• Categorize your products
• Keep the catalogue up-to-date
• Inform customers about product's availability and approximate arrival date 

If you want to offer your customers hundreds of products in your app, you should take care of search opportunities. Make your in-app search fast and flexible so users could reach goods they're looking for with minimum efforts. In another case, there is a probability that some of them will leave your app without making any orders.

Take a look at the retail mobile application by Zappos, where they've implemented the opportunity to search for items by using emojis. That may seem like the useless feature but, in fact, it helps to engage users and may affect on your app's lifetime value metric.

Filters allow your users to narrow the list of goods they'd like to see. This way, they can choose parameters like size, color, shape and so on to see only those items that correspond their preferences. Besides, you can sort your goods by popularity, price (from lowest to highest and vice versa), brand etc.

By giving users such options in your app for retail business, you increase the probability that the product they're searching for will be found and bought through the app.

After users added all the items they want to buy to the cart, you should give them an opportunity to check the total price (including tax and shipping) for their goods before charging funds. Keep the UX of this screen simple and eye-catching in order customers weren't faced with any troubles before purchasing. In other case, you can lose a part of them.

Also, watch our video on how to integrate a payment gateway into an app. 

Moving to payment, except for ordinary credit card we can suggest you to add payment systems like Apple Pay or Android Pay. They are a perfect fit for mobile shopping.

Profiles in retail mobile apps intended to give users an opportunity to change and save their personal information rapidly. Besides, they allow participating in loyalty programs and getting personalized discounts and offers.

However, it's not all rosy. The point is many users don't want to remember one more login and password, so they refuse to register despite all the bonuses you propose. The most reasonable way out is to propose them signing up via social networks. Both sides benefit -- you get an active user, while a customer has no headaches with logins and passwords.

I hope we covered all the point you were looking for. Subscribe to our newsletters by filling the form on the right (or at the end of the page if you browse through mobile) and get our updates delivery on email!

In case you want to start the retail mobile app development for your business -- contact our managers. They'll tell you more about our company and answer all your questions.