The increased usage of the internet for making online purchases has significantly impacted the growth of advertising and marketing of physical products, digital products, and services online. Today’s e-commerce technology integrates marketing, distribution, sales, PR agents, market researchers, media, and more. The top online activities performed by users are planning trips, researching products they’d like to purchase, emailing, and online banking. Companies that have been most successful during the e-commerce revolution are those which have adopted the click-and-mortar approach where they continue their business in physical locations but also integrate e-commerce components into their b2c businesses.
US e-commerce is expected to cross $1 trillion in 2022. This means e-commerce companies are continuing to become more productive and cost-effective as online shopping keeps climbing, customer demand online increases, and companies keep building more user-friendly e-commerce services. The greatest revolution of the 21st century is not led by companies that focus on products or services but instead by ones that create a channel between their customers’ mobile devices and their business, also known as m-commerce. Building a more customer-oriented, personalized, user-friendly e-commerce mobile application is the secret behind any successful online business, and companies such as Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Shopify are leaders in this space. Today, there are an estimated 12 to 24 million e-commerce platforms around the globe, and these numbers continue to increase every single day. Therefore, as you work to launch the next innovation in e-commerce, keep these 10 top secrets in mind to build your successful e-commerce app.
Here are the top e-commerce stores in the Apple App Store and Google Play stores to provide you inspiration for building your own e-commerce app.
Shopify’s mobile app makes it easy for businesses to reach their users online, in-store, or even through social media. E-commerce support for physical products/shipping, digital products, services, and drop shipping operations are available through the mobile app.
Kajabi assists users with a lot of integrations, on-platform tools and marketing tips once the online store is launched. It’s the best option for creating online courses, coaching businesses, and membership sites.
Woocommerce is a completely free, open-source e-commerce platform even for beginners. You can add unlimited products to your store and grow your business.
Bigcommerce is a suitable app for big businesses, which offers a free trial for your online business. It has built-in integration for different payment platforms like PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, Aithorize.net, and so on. It also provides a free domain name option where you can create a custom domain name.
Magneto is another e-commerce platform owned by Adobe with an easy-to-use interface. It requires a bit of coding if you want to upgrade your app store with some extensions and customizations. It also provides flexibility and fast loading time. The Magneto community is a free platform for building an e-commerce store with little investment.
Squarespace is the best choice for small businesses. Even though it doesn’t offer a free plan, it has one of the cheapest paid pricing plans. It also has a great blogging tool and provides support for its blogging suite with a pre-made post format for you to edit.
ThriveCart is a shopping cart platform that is very helpful for businesses to generate leads and improve conversion. This sales cart solution helps create checkout options for goods and services. It doesn’t charge for purchases in its limited offering with a lifetime account. It offers the best shopping cart service for digital products.
Shipstation Mobile is an app option for retailers to organize, process, and fulfill their orders. This shipping software for e-commerce fulfillment helps to manage small parcel and LTL (less than a truck) shipping requirements. It is worth the investment for a growing company and comes with API customizations.
Samcart is yet another easy shopping software option for creators. It mostly focuses on check-out pages rather than entire online stores. This check-out platform provides high-converting check-out templates with order bumps where you can add on additional items at check out, subscriptions, and the most important one-click upsell, which is an offer given post-purchase once the customers have submitted their credit card details.
eBay mobile apps are getting popular with excellent search, filter, and barcode scan facilities. It has a PayPal payment option which makes it easy to complete payments. The ability to track is yet another useful feature together with a large CTA (call to action) which allows users to make purchases or place a bid in a single click.
Amazon seller apps are designed ergonomically, which best suits the needs of users to upload their products, sell them, and finally track payments. It manages the inventory, offers, and orders, and manages sponsored product campaigns.
Walmart’s app is a very popular marketplace to sell your products, Walmart US e-commerce sales amounted to $4.7 billion in 2022, a 11% increase from 2021. Walmart’s e-commerce app has made it possible for people to have valued services with fast shipping and low-priced goods. It also has the benefit of no setup or maintenance fees. Finally, it attracts customers, has earned their loyalty, and helps sellers reap the benefit of Walmart’s accounting and customer service tools.
Canva – It is a free platform for anyone to use without prior experience. It provides plenty of templates and multiple fonts for your business to design your brand and logo. Finally, it has a color wheel to customize your color and theme preferences.
Pexels- This is another royalty-free platform that offers free stock photos and videos. It helps you create collections and organize them and can help users create different projects. The photos and videos shared have wide reachability.
Google keyword planner- You can start using this free tool with a Google Adwords account. This allows you to access the keywords and phrases that users are searching for when they are making their purchases. Google also offers Google page insights and Google analytics to provide better user experiences and improve business decisions.
Mailchimp is the best free tool for growing your business, it also provides email templates and automation features. The interface is simple and can be customized based on the target audience, so you can create email series, make announcements, and also view performance analytics.
Shopify free tools- Even though Shopify isn’t free, it provides free tools such as: creating a URL, designing business cards, business name generator, logo generator, image sizer, etc
Unsplash- This royalty-free image bank can help you add high quality pictures and build new features for your online store. Its user-friendly interface enables users to develop graphics, videos, and images of high quality without any credit or attribution required.
Lottie animations are the open-source animation file format that uses a series of animations that are ready to use for e-commerce sites and projects. They are absolutely free to download. Another unique feature of Lottie animations files is that they are small in size, without compromising their quality and they are interactive.
Stripe is another great solution for e-commerce. It enables users to stay on the same page without being redirected to another site to checkout, hence is the most reliable payment option and easy to set up for recurring payments. This payment processing platform charges a flat rate fee and, transaction-based fees but no monthly or annual fees.
Zapier is a workflow automation platform that helps connect your work apps and complete repetitive tasks based on the set of rules and triggers determined by the user. It has a free trial of 14 days and a paid option as well.
Alta is a mobile app-building suitable for small business and mid-market companies.. Alta has integrations with the latest technologies and has a user-friendly UI. It also offers free templates, and tables to store your data, and secure payment options. In addition to this, Alta offers users 24/7 support and guidance for beginners. Looking to build an e-commerce mobile app? Alta's free plan can help you get started so sign up today!
