Mobile devices are changing consumer habits like never before. Studies suggest that seven out of every ten users use mobile phone for buying items online. Moreover, there exist users who do not have a desktop computer but do have a smartphone for accessing the internet. As an e-commerce venture, if your target audience primarily uses mobile devices for accessing the internet, you must consider producing your online store as a mobile app. Luckily, popular e-commerce platforms such as Magento have made it easy to create an online store app with suitable extensions such as Mofluid and Simicart. These extensions allow customization of your mobile app store to some degree. Other than deploying such an extension, you can also choose to avail an app development service.
Availing either of these options require you to know about two major aspects of your mobile store, which are:
Design: You must make sure that your mobile e-commerce application is designed according to the best principles of responsive design and optimum user-experience. A mobile e-commerce experience unlike its desktop version calls for specific design guidelines such as the prominence of CTA buttons, employing a minimum number of images, considering the thumb-friendly region while designing and etc. Moreover, you can have a customized look created for your online store app by availing PSD to Magento conversion services.
Functionality: Like any Magento e-commerce store, a mobile app online store would require the deployment of suitable functionalities such as payment gateways, checkout, social sharing, affiliate marketing, billing and invoicing, tax calculation, and etc. If you are deploying a Magento app builder extension, you will have to configure suitable modules on your online store’s website too. Moreover, you can render your store with additional and unique functionalities by availing Magento module development services.
In addition to attending to these two major aspects, you must also choose the most suitable route for your e-commerce app development. For this, you must know that deploying a suitable extension for creating your e-commerce app will come with its own limitations, and in order to create a fully customized experience for your customers, availing app development services would be an ideal choice. Moreover, both come with different price tags. Thus, while choosing either of the available alternatives you must consider your needs and budget. You can begin by asking yourself the following questions:
Are you creating an e-commerce experience for high-end consumers or medium and low-end consumers?
What is your budget like?
And how soon do you want your e-commerce app to be built?
With respect to the answers to these questions you can choose a suitable option for rolling out your e-commerce app. That is, if you have a good budget, are serving high-end users, and can wait for a sufficient time duration, it would be an ideal choice to go by the route of iOS/android app development or else the latter option of using a Magento mobile app builder extension would be suitable.
Angela
