With the ongoing pandemic threats, people around the world are advised to stay at home as much as possible and to minimize direct physical contact with other people. To further slash the covid-19 infection rate, the operating hours of local brick and mortar shops are shortened. This has pushed businesses to find other ways to provide their customers the products and services they need without going out of their homes. And one of these solutions is to establish an online shopping portal.
The convenience of online shopping has caused more people to get hooked to it. e-commerce has exponentially grown since its origin. Now, online shopping has become a trend and this trend is expected to last even after the pandemic. This is why more and more businesses are now jumping into the e-commerce arena. With the rising competition among local, national, and international brands, however, having just an online shopping portal or e-commerce store is no longer enough. If you want your business to thrive and advance, you will need to offer more to your customers. And building an e-commerce app for your brand can be a brilliant and viable solution for this.
But developing an eCommerce app is not a piece of cake. Along the way, you will encounter various kinds of challenges that will test your tenacity, adroitness, and cleverness. Knowing the most common challenges that you might stumble upon during the app development process will greatly help you find a better and quicker solution. Check out these top 10 challenges in developing an e-commerce app.
1. Lack of knowledge and experience
Developing an e-commerce app without the right amount of knowledge and experience can only result in more challenges along the way. While some of these challenges are inevitable, you can at least minimize risks and increase your success rate if you have enough knowledge, expertise, and experience.
2. How to make your e-commerce app accessible across diverse devices
Another major problem that you need to deal with is your e-commerce app’s accessibility. It can be quite challenging to make your e-commerce app accessible through different kinds of devices, browsers, operating systems, and screen sizes.
3. Making the e-commerce app SEO friendly
There are thousands, if not millions, of e-commerce apps around the world. And you can’t just expect yours to get noticed right away. If you want to boost your app’s online presence and have it displayed on the top portion of the SERPs, you need to do some SEO. And it will be too tough if your e-commerce app is not SEO-friendly.
Having extensive knowledge on how search engine crawlers work can help you develop an SEO-friendly e-commerce app.
4. Ensuring security
Security is a major concern when it comes to developing an e-commerce app. Your customers will not entrust their sensitive personal and financial information to you if you can’t ensure their security. They will also never transact with your business through your e-commerce app unless they are sure that they are protected with the highest level of security.
5. Compatibility
This is something closely related to accessibility. Your e-commerce app may be accessible through diverse devices, browsers, operating systems, and screen sizes, but they may not always be compatible. You would want the app to run seamlessly and effortlessly to ensure optimum overall user experience.
6. Internet accessibility variability
Internet accessibility is quite variable. Some users may enjoy ultra-fast internet speed and some may not. If you want your e-commerce app to cater to all sorts of users with variable internet accessibility, you have to consider this limitation when developing an app.
Also, consider the amount of data your e-commerce app will likely consume. As much as possible, use lighter file formats so that users with limited internet data can still get access to your app without worrying about exhausting their data allowance.
7. Fitting a huge chunk of data into a compact size e-commerce app
Users typically check the app size before downloading. Most often, users take their hands off of large apps. Apart from the fact that large apps consume a considerable amount of space on your electronic device, they will also eat up a large percentage of the battery of your device and your internet data allowance as well.
The size can also affect the functionalities of the app. To ensure that the app runs smoothly, and all the functionalities work well, aim to develop an e-commerce app with a more compact size.
8. Making the app user-friendly
Even if your app will offer functionalities and features that are not found in other similar apps, its download rate will still be low if the entire interface is far from being user-friendly. Users, in general, prefer apps with a straightforward and secured checkout process, intuitive buttons, great navigation features, and pleasing visual identity more than those without. All these can affect the overall experience.
9. What features and functionalities to include
If you try to look further, the challenges mentioned above are all interrelated. And they may all affect the selection of features and functionalities that you need to integrate into the e-commerce app that you are developing.
10. Choosing the right product
One of the primary challenge’s businesses face when developing an e-commerce app is choosing the right product. You can find a myriad of products and services options you can choose from but you can’t just pick any of them randomly. The type of products or services you will be offering will serve as a foundation of your e-commerce app. Before you even start opening an online shop and developing an e-commerce app, you need to solve this puzzle first.
Creating an e-commerce app will require a lot of time, effort, and investment. If you don’t want all these to go in vain, consider carrying out extensive research on the market trends first.
Even if your business already has its own products or services, extensive market research is still needed. With the help of the information you can obtain from your market research, you can be able to determine the viability of your products or services. This can also help you build an e-commerce app that will best present your unique selling proposition.
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