When you are planning to build a retail app, you are entering into a sea of competition where you will get to see new players and ideas coming in and big changes and developments happening around at a fast pace. To stand sturdy and firm in the ever-growing competition in the space of retail, you need to commit to authentic practices and advanced methods, and most of all you should not miss to go with features that help you build the solution that matches the latest market trends and goes with the latest user preferences and demands.
Thus, to make a good retail app you need to follow different conventions and theories of a good online venture and put up with channels and marketers to bring the most out of your efforts. And on the top of all your ideas and efforts need to bind these practices together to go in your favor. Going with these 5 features would help you do that with great authority and ability:
We have gone past the days when we used to depend on just one channel to interface with a certain display option or device type. These days users are exposed to different computing technologies and don’t just have a certain device to depend on for meeting their purpose.
Taking a scenario, the user can first have a quick look at an item on their mobile phone while travelling from office to home. Which can be further taken to the desktop at home for more detailed and handy research. This could hop on to the office laptop once the user enters the buying frame of mind and decides to commit purchase on the portal. This journey of user becoming a prospect can take time to mature to sales and that doesn’t necessarily limit to a certain device or interface.
That emphasizes on the fact that as a retailer you need to be present everywhere and consistently serve your customers across different channels alike. This requires you to build your app to behave consistently and responsively across different devices and display units by going omnichannel.
When building a retail app, you must make sure that you manage your inventory well and connect the physical stock with your virtual selling machinery. This is important as your user would least expect the ordered item to go out of stock or get delayed for delivery. Therefore, you need to establish synergy between the orders placed online with the physical availability and deliverability of the product.
This not only ensures that your order sourcing and facilitation processes are all aligned well and serves the users well but also makes sure that you achieve accuracy and speed with your offerings. You can further make it cater better to user experience by offering users with auto-suggestions and contextual responses, matching the online searches and queries with deep-linked and multi-layered alternative search options.
This not only allows to optimize the app service and communication value by streamlining the physical SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) with the online availability but also allow the user to realize and consume automated benefits in the form of upselling and cross-selling through product suggestions, premium services and packaging options.
Be it any business, users like to get rewarded and bonused with those extra benefits and incentives. And in a segment like retail, it is almost a convention to keep users served with that extra value. So, when you are making people come to your retail app, you got to be smartly building your loyalty incentive program to keep them well engaged and served with your offerings.
To be able to strike it right you can look at what the top retail apps are doing and see what suits best in your case. Or you can try to come out with some tempting gamified incentives to keep your users engaged and wanting to explore more of your service. Keep them increasingly involved with your progressive user appraisal and scoring schemes.
A more direct way of rewarding them is allowing them to earn redeemable points as they do shopping on your app. This will keep users coming and get engaged for a long time and will encourage them to shop more frequently and show more interest in your products. Also, you can leverage it to add more users by introducing some referral program. Apart from this, you can also offer them incremental discount based on their birthdays or other special days, to get more aggressive with your loyalty incentives.
In today’s competitive retail scenario, you have to be customer-centric and keep moving with the trends, offering end-to-end benefits with your solution.
So, when it’s about escalating your customer to the checkout point, you should be behaving equally flexible and relatable as you did while receiving them. To be able to do that, you need to offer them multiple payment options considering different needs and preferences they have. These options could include Credit/Debit card, Net Banking, Pay Wallet, Cash on delivery, Coupons and Vouchers etc. and these can be best selected and implemented establishing the relevance with your retail practices, product type and business policies.
Payment Gateway: PayPal vs Authorize.net vs Google Wallet
Here, you also need to consider different device and display types and accordingly build the process to best suit the platform’s processing environment and functional properties. So, as you go about planning and appointing the payment process, you need to think from the perspective of user and their expected behavior on different devices.
Like for example, a mobile user would require it to be leaner and sleeker to be able to easily pay and checkout while on-the-move. Also, as there’s a considerable difference in a desktop screen and a mobile screen size, you need to go light and easy while doing it for mobile users. Here, a recommended way is to go with payment solutions like PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay over the customized options, if you want to look consistent across different consoles.
Most of the companies these days, are looking to explore and extract the user data to utilize the location information for serving them better in terms of quality, proofing and compliance. They are spending heavily and most of the times sacrificing current opportunities to get all the details related to user location by their side. This is allowing them to be on the top of information curve, to allow them strength and edge over competitors. And this is because they are able to pitch, perform, and deliver better exploring and churning location particulars.
This is the reason, detecting and knowing user location can change the game for a business greatly. It has proven to be of great benefit and use for a provider from different strategic and functional perspectives. Having the location details of user, businesses can offer them with more informed and relevant solutions that are well based on contextually rich and more immediate and valid data.
If your app is targeted to serve a wider userbase that is spread across different geographical areas and locations, it becomes all the more important for you to do this.
And to be able to drive things in your favor, you must be unfailingly seeking location information from users. You can do this by mechanizing the app to collect and process location details with enough accuracy, promptness and consistency. Doing this, you are sure going to be among the smart players who do it best keeping the ever-competent location benefits on the top of the information base.
The more you go through these points the more you will be convinced of the fact that without following these ideas and applying them right, you cannot do justice to your retail app solution. So, no matter how unique your application functionality is or how attractive is the design, or for that matter, how strong your communication model is, if you are not taking up these five features well enough into your system, you are at a high risk of losing it all in your e-retail endeavor.
Adding to that, whenever you plan a retail solution, you need to keep quality, performance and the user value aspect of it on top to grab the most out of it. And combining and seeing these features together in one platter, the idea of procuring these values seems much possible.
Vipin Jain is the Co-Founder and CEO at Konstant Infosolutions and is in charge of marketing, project management, administration and R&D at the company. With his marketing background, Vipin Jain has developed and honed the company’s vision, corporate structure & initiatives and its goals, and brought the company into the current era of success.
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