How to Build a Mobile App For Retail Business?

If we take more “down-to-earth” numbers, nearly half of all online shoppers use their mobile devices to make purchases, making them the most used type of device for online shopping.

So, your own retail app with a good UI/UX design can help your business in many ways: from expanding your clientele, to using modern technologies to allow users to take a virtual look at your product.

If you want to learn more about it, build your own retail mobile app, or improve the existing solution — welcome!

📈 How a Retail App Can Help You Improve Your Business

Businesses in the retail industry can benefit from having their own app in many ways. Sales, loyalty, data analysis — all of that can be significantly improved with a well-developed app.

Let’s take a look at how exactly your retail business can improve with an app. In case you’re already well-informed about all the benefits, feel free to skip to the next section by following this link.

# 1: Reach a Wider Audience 📣

By developing a retail mobile app, you can extend the boundaries of your location. For example, you can start not only “targeting” the people who walk past your store or live in the same area, but also all online shoppers in your country or even abroad, depending on your business model.

Besides, you should take into account that certain features are only accessible for mobile apps. For instance, push-notifications. Websites can be modified with desktop notifications instead, while PWAs are unable to use either one of these options.

✅ e-Commerce App Builders vs. Custom Retail App: What Is the Difference

There are a lot of different app builders like Appypie, Zoho Creator, and iBuildApp on the market that some businesses use before developing their own custom app.

However, many of them eventually do build a custom solution. Let’s review the main use cases; hopefully, they will help you understand which one of the options might meet your business needs better and why you should consider switching to a custom one.

App Builders: Use Cases

App builders are used by businesses at early stages of digitization. They can be beneficial for your business in several different ways:

• The development is fast.
• It’s intended for low-budget development.
• “Out-of-the-box” solutions almost never require coding skills.
• It’s not likely that you’ll have to hire additional staff to work with a pre-packaged solution.

However, a custom retail app isn’t that affordable and requires more time compared to app builders.

Taking these benefits and drawbacks of custom solutions into account, here are the most popular use cases:

# 1: You know that the idea you have will work, meaning, you either already successfully trade on third-party services or have made an MVP that came out successfully after a certain testing time.

# 2: The app builder solution isn’t able to cover all of your new business needs or you’ve outgrown the stage when it was enough — you have more users now, you need more advanced functionality & design, etc.

# 3: Your business needs a specific combination of features or additional integrations that an “out-of-the-box” app can’t provide or prohibits adding. However, those who do provide non-custom experience often set a price level for such luxuries pretty high.

A little sidenote: if you weren’t sure whether you should develop a mobile or web-based app, take a look at these statistics: 93% of mobile consumers would prefer online shopping using retail apps over PWA.

However, if you only plan to improve the in-store experience, it might be more reasonable to create a PWA so that customers won’t have to download your app for a quick tour around the store — that can be pretty discouraging.

⚙️ Top Features of an eCommerce App

In this section, we’ll review the main features of a retail mobile app. Sure thing, you might need something additional or might not need a certain feature — each case is unique.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔐

We often recommend making this feature optional so users don’t get discouraged by the sign-up process. As for retail businesses, our advice would be to still make the sign up optional, yet encourage customers to do it.

For instance, offer to save all details like a payment option, phone number, etc., so that the next time users won’t have to type it in again.

Additionally, previously chosen items are deleted from the cart when a user with no account closes the app. So, to allow users to save items as “Favorites,” an account needs to be created.

Best support services normally have:

• A chatbot that’s able to answer simple requests and/or pass them on to specialists.
• Live chats with real specialists.
• Multiple FAQs pages with possible pre-answered questions.
• Phone support.
• A list of contacts with phone numbers, email addresses, links to Social Media accounts, messengers like Viber and WhatsApp.

🤖 Tech Stack for Retail Mobile App

Retail mobile apps can be modified with many advanced technologies and APIs. Let’s take a look at the most popular ones.

iBeacons

By integrating iBeacons into your store, you can enable interaction between your customers’ phones & these devices. The use cases are quite wide — from greeting your customers when they enter the store to sending notifications about ongoing sales to special offers to providing indoor mapping.

Indoor mapping can include leading customers to desired products, certain departments of the store, checkout points, exit, etc.

Augmented & Virtual Reality

Instead of describing it theoretically, we decided to show you some real-life use cases that best represent how you can use it:

• The famous cosmetic giant Sephora enriched their app with the “Virtual Artist” feature. It allows users to test the company's products directly in the app by using photos or in live mode, without having to actually put any real makeup on.
• The IKEA Catalog app uses well-developed augmented reality technologies and provides users with the possibility to virtually place furniture in the room.
• You can also use virtual reality like Alibaba’s Taobao app, as it supports 3D viewing of products.

APIs

You can add various integrations to your app:

• To enable secure payments, you can use Braintree, Stripe, PayPal.
• For shipping integration, these APIs might be suitable: FedEx, UPS.
• For marketing automation, you can use Mailchimp, Zoho Campaigns, etc.
• To analyze customer data, there are great solutions — Google Analytics.

💡 Takeaways

To sum up, retail mobile apps are highly beneficial for most businesses — they can help to increase sales & improve brand liability, modify a business with different integrations.

So, here are the main steps you should take to build your own retail mobile app:

• Choose between app builders & custom apps.
• Decide what features you want to have in your app.
• Find a Tech Partner team & start the development process.

If you need any help with the development or have some questions left, feel free to reach out to us. We’ll find a way to help you!