eCommerce Mobile App Development: Tips to Build an App That Sells Well in 2022

posted on January 5, 2022

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Making purchases through websites and eCommerce apps has become the most popular and convenient way to do shopping. According to Statista, the global eCommerce software application market will bring over 1.3 billion dollars in revenue between 2019 and 2024. So, if you still haven’t entered the eCommerce market, it’s high time to launch an eCommerce app for your business.

Check out this article to learn everything you need to know about mobile shopping app development and the top mobile commerce trends in 2022.

Mobile Commerce Trends in 2022

The constant growth of the eCommerce market contributes to the active development of new aspects in mobile commerce. So, whether you plan to build an eCommerce application or already have one, you should be aware of the recent trends in eCommerce mobile app development so you can benefit from them.

Chatbots

Chatbots enable businesses to automate communications with customers on a 24/7 basis. This mobile commerce technology allows businesses to not only answer the most popular user requests, but also to anticipate their next questions, thanks to AI and Machine Learning advancements. Thus, every client receives personalized customer support and an excellent shopping experience.

AR

Augmented reality in eCommerce allows users to test a product before buying it. What does it look like in practice? Customers see how products will look on them or in their homes to ensure they meet expectations. Thanks to this trend, you can provide an excellent shopping experience to your clients, even during the COVID-19 quarantine.

Wish List

You can significantly increase sales on your site and improve your customer experience with a wish list. Once you implement a wish list into your eCommerce app design, the number of users who return to your store will grow, thus raising the number of future store purchases. Moreover, this feature can incorporate notifications that can inform the client of the desired item’s availability.

Geofencing

More and more stores use geofencing for promoting their products on the web. With this mobile commerce trend, you can promote items based on a user’s location which allows you to focus on a specific target audience. Apply geofencing to increase your eCommerce app sales by up to 20% as other companies have already done.

Omnichannel Shopping Experience

If you want to develop your mobile business commerce, you have to sell in more than one place. Focus on an omnichannel shopping approach to boost mobile commerce sales by growing a website, an app, and social media presence simultaneously.

Voice Assistants

A voice-friendly website or eCommerce app is an essential retail business element in 2022. People use assistants such as Alexa and Siri when buying goods for their home such as clothes, cosmetics, books, and much more. So, if you want to increase store sales, voice searching technology can do that for you.

One-click Purchasing

Experience has shown that customers often abandon the purchase process when faced with performing too many steps to complete a transaction. With a one-click purchasing feature, however, there is no need to retype data over and over because your payment details are saved.

Shopping Personalization

Shopping personalization can raise customer satisfaction by 20%, allowing businesses to grow their incomes quickly and effortlessly. Many companies invest heavily into personalized marketing to draw user attention with personalized emails based on their previous purchases. Besides, this trend is associated with the use of Predictive Analytics which can forecast the product a customer will buy next.

Big Data

Want to predict buyer preferences or to calculate a suitable product price based on hundreds of your competitors’ price tags? Big data algorithms help businesses anticipate the latest mobile eCommerce trends and user preferences, so that you can pack your store with products that are in high demand.

eCommerce App Development Process

The eCommerce app development flow is comprised of several stages:

  1. Defining requirements to figure out the features, interface, and design elements of the future app.
  2. Market analysis to evaluate the strength and weaknesses of your project, along with the opportunities you may deliver to users.
  3. Gathering a team of highly competent specialists who can successfully implement all your ideas and requirements. This includes hiring a project manager, UX/UI designers, quality assurance, backend, frontend, and mobile developers, DevOps specialists, etc.
  4. Developing an MVP (minimal viable product), namely the main features that will be tested by the users to collect feedback.
  5. Further app development, based on the gathered feedback.

Ecommerce Mobile App Development Cost in 2021

eCommerce app development costs may range a great deal, depending on many factors, including the complexity and functionality of the app. The more features your eCommerce app contains, the more time your team will require for their implementation. To calculate the total time on building a mobile commerce application and estimate your project’s budget, you can divide the whole development process into the following work types:

  • design
  • front-end development
  • back-end development
  • non-tech development and meetings

In addition, consider the location of your outsourced team and the complexity of the features you want to add. On average an MVP of a shopping app can cost between $50,000 – $80,000.

Conclusion

Use the mobile commerce trends mentioned in this article to develop your business by driving tremendous traffic and increasing sales. Hire a team of professional developers to save money on eCommerce mobile app development features so you can launch a user-friendly and functional application for your store.

FAQs

How Much Does It Cost to Develop an Ecommerce App?

Creating an eCommerce app can cost from $25,000 to $150,000 or more, for both iOS and Android, depending on the project’s complexity and functionality.

How Do You Make an Ecommerce App?

To build a successful eCommerce app, you need to come up with an excellent app idea first. Make a thorough analysis of the market to define the problems of your target audience. Then, list down the essential features of the application, plan out its design, and proceed with its further development.

What Makes a Good Ecommerce App?

With a good eCommerce app, you can deliver a remarkable customer experience for your users and your prospective clients. Equip your application with the best eCommerce features so that it can make your business flourish.

The post eCommerce Mobile App Development: Tips to Build an App That Sells Well in 2022 appeared first on SiteProNews.

7 Chatbot Mistakes that are Costing You Customers

posted on September 3, 2021

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A chatbot is software that uses text messages to imitate human-like conversations with users. Its primary goal is to assist users by answering their inquiries. But what if there are mistakes in your chatbot that are costing you customers? You want to increase your customer retention and conversion rate using chatbots, but what if your chatbot is taking your customers and newly-generated leads away from you?

Here in this article, we will introduce chatbot mistakes that are costing you customers. Knowing these mistakes and chatbot hacks can help you have a more user-friendly chatbot. Read carefully and make your chatbot efficient.

Chatbot Mistakes that are Costing You Customers 

We now live in a society that values satisfaction. Despite their ability to provide quick answers to simple questions, customer care chatbots are still underutilized. AI chatbots are used by only 23% of customer support businesses, although they are preferred by 69 percent of customers.

Jumping into the realm of chatbots may seem frightening at first, but your clients will appreciate you in the long run, at least if you do it right. Taken as a whole, using a chatbot is a great way to scale your website traffic or increase your app download. Fortunately, the most common chatbot errors are also some of the most simple to avoid. Here are some:

1. Your Chatbot Has No Plan.

It is a mistake to have a chatbot without a story or plan. Your chatbot must have a defined goal. Your goal depends on the objectives of your business. This could include offering individualized brand engagement to encourage customer retention. Or, it might be reducing the number of customer support calls, saving you time and money.

Customers won’t  like to communicate with your chatbot if it does not serve a clear purpose. To have an efficient chatbot, you should make a clear plan first and write your chatbot. Focus on functionality while keeping the bottom line in mind.

2. Your Chatbot Does Not Provide True Information.

Imagine that you go to a store to buy something or report a problem regarding your previous purchase. If the person at the front desk does not give you the right information, you cannot communicate your problem well. As a result, your problem will remain unsolved. 

Now, imagine that your chatbot makes the same mistake. Before making a purchase, users frequently use chatbots to obtain information about products and services. What do you think the result would be? You have a considerably greater risk of losing your customers or newly-generated leads if your chatbot only gives ambiguous, unconnected, or unimportant information. 

To avoid this, make sure your chatbot has information that your customers genuinely want, such as ratings and full product descriptions.

3. It Makes Your Users Struggle to Communicate.

One of the most prevalent chatbot errors is making the user work too hard to acquire responses. Chatbots are supposed to be handier than talking with a real person. If a real person could be more efficient, there would be no need for a chatbot. So, if your chatbot is making your users more confused and angry, what’s the point of having one.  

To avoid this, ensure that your chatbot is always moving the customer forward. Answers should be actionable rather than being a dead end. Even if the interaction appears to be done, your chatbot should direct the user to a FAQ section in case they have additional queries.

4. It Has No Human Voice.

You should give your chatbot a human voice. Users should not feel that they are talking to a robot because it may give them the feeling that the robot cannot solve their problem. In addition, your chatbot, like all humans, should have a name and a personality. It helps increase your brand recognition. The name of your chatbot should be original, easy to say and spell, and easy to remember. 

5. You Have Not Tested It.

Before you launch your chatbot, ensure that it is genuinely ready for consumers. To ensure that your chatbot works as it should, it must be thoroughly tested in a variety of scenarios. If you do not test your chatbot, it could result in a drastic drop in sales without you realizing the cause of is your inefficient chatbot. Imagine that you are a newcomer who is interacting with your business for the first time through the chatbot. Do you find it helpful? If not, you need to make some improvements to it.  

6. There Is No Human Agent

While the vast majority of users prefer to get a speedy response from an AI, certain people will always prefer to speak with a human. Customer support should not end with your chatbot. It’s simply a tool that can be quite beneficial. Make sure that if a user wants to speak with a real, breathing human agent, they have that choice.

7. Updating Your Chatbot is Neglected

Regardless of how thoroughly you test a chatbot before releasing it to the public, it might still make mistakes or develop harmful quirks as time goes on. There is no way to account for everything straight away. The most successful chatbots are updated and maintained on a regular basis.

Remember to examine your chatbot on a frequent basis as time goes on to see if there are any adjustments or upgrades you can do to better serve your consumers.

Conclusion

Turning to AI for customer service is indeed a smart move for your business. Chatbots have enabled businesses to assist customers at all hours of the day and night. This is good if they are working efficiently instead of making things more complicated for your users. If you are fully aware of chatbot benefits for your business, you won’t waste a second to either launch one or improve the one that you already have. Check the above common mistakes and solve them for your chatbot. Wish you the best of luck!

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Pros and Cons of Social Media Chatbots

posted on August 13, 2021

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What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is short for Chat Robot. Simply,a chatbot is acomputer program that converses with the user through an interface. Fundamentally, a chatbot allows a form of interaction between a human and a machine. It is programmed to work independently from a human operator.

Interactions with Chatbots

The user can interact or have a conversation with the chatbot by typing or simply by using their voice. This totally depends on the type of chatbot the user is interacting with. Some very popular chatbots that almost everyone has heard of are Apple Siri and Alexa that take voice as input.

The rise of Chatbots

Today, we cannot imagine a world without chatbots since it has become part of ordinary transactions. In 1995, A.L.I.C.E, a language-processing bot, gained popularity and therefore in 2016, Facebook enabled the development of AI customer service. This eventually allowed business developers to create bots that would converse with their followers. Businesses have also integrated chatbots into their websites.

Chatbots can bring you up to speed with technological advancements and vastly improve customer engagements.

Business-oriented Chatbots

If you’re an e-commerce company, a brand or anyone running a business, then chatbots are the strategy that you must adopt. Chatbots provide a great business opportunity for both small and larger companies. More and more businesses are using them for online customer service to resolve issues and answer simple questions. Many companies are looking at various ways to use chatbots to improve and scale the customer experience whether for shopping, booking or customer service.

Instantaneous Response

If you are an impatient person then certainly chatbot is for you! A Customer always desires a fast response. According to an analysis, 40% of customers don’t care whether a human or a chatbot responds to their question as long as they get quick help.

But, a chatbot may not always know what and how to respond to several customer questions. That depends on its programming and functionalities, and how intelligent they are programmed to be. So, if the customer does not use the correct phrasing, that chatbot may not know how to respond.

Constantly Available

Chatbots are most beneficial when it comes to availability. They help to reduce operational costs by being available 365 days a year and 24 hours a day. Obviously, if we compare a human counsellor and a chatbot counsellor, the best thing about the chatbot is that it’s always there and is super-efficient. The user can have instant knowledge of anything and anytime using a chatbot.

Chatbots are the future of communication that save a lot of time dealing with customers and guiding them physically and individually.

Messenger Marketing

Chatbots can be used in marketing and are one of the advanced ways of communication between a business and the customer. Also, if we have a look at the statistics, more than 86% of people are interested in talking with chatbots because chatbots can solve their basic problems and is the better alternative to email marketing or Messenger marketing.

Increase repeat Marketing

When we buy something using a chatbot and process payment, we are often asked at the end if we would like to stay up to date with our order. So, chatbots basically keep us updated with our package information when it gets shipped or any other issues. After some time, chatbots may ask for a review of the product or service to keep us engaged. 

Increasing sales using Chatbots

Chatbots are very useful in making suggestions or recommendations on everything, ranging  from products to services. They are super intelligent and can help in capturing desired targeted leads in less time. They study their users/customers and make personalized recommendations by interacting with them to know more about their preferences. Chatbots also interpret their user’s likes and dislikes and make suggestions accordingly.

Social Media Chatbots

On Facebook there are over 10,000 developers building chatbots. Chatbots are becoming very popular in social media applications. Chatbots are also used on Messenger as well as many websites. 

Brand or social media chatbots can converse with users about any customer queries and are pre-programmed to answer those specific questions.

Well-being of Business

According to Chatbots Magazine, customer support service businesses using chatbots have saved up to 30% in cost by answering essential client questions.  Research confirmed that chatbots were responsible for $20 million in business savings in 2017. In addition, chatbots have also helped reduce workload and allowed business executives to focus on creating new business ideas.

Moreover, if optimized correctly, businesses can help customers make better decisions via chatbots. For example, customers who purchase something for the first time, especially things related to technical stuff with many alternatives, (i.e, WordPress hosting service) want extra help. You can optimize chatbots with information like which WordPress hosting service is suitable for what purpose and how it should be optimized to get remarkable results. 

Personalize conversation

Personalization is a major factor in modern marketing. You can program a chatbot to recognize a person’s name from his/her Facebook profile by programming your bot correctly. You will then be able to push information to each individual that is specific to him or her. Conversational data can be analyzed and provide invaluable insight into individualized marketing campaigns.

Combine Artificial Intelligence with Human Intelligence

Online businesses are developing chatbots that you can message and talk with regarding any issue. It is just like having a conversation with a human. More companies are using chatbots as a way to engage with and assist their audiences.

Chatbots can understand and reply to users more casually and will also get smarter with time as they interact with users. 

Unfortunately, Customer service agents can make mistakes in relaying information to customers. Using a chatbot, we can provide accurate information and results to the customer. For example, Google’s new chatbot “Meena” is said to be the most human-like AI chatbot ever. This is the SSA analysis which means that we can easily mistake Meena for a real human.

Managing Customer Requests

Too many customer requests? Well, a chatbot can easily deal with countless client requests. Chatbots save the hassle of having to place a call, having to wait to speak to a person, then trying to get the information from that person. AI chatbots can help handle up to 85% of customer service interactions within a year.

Cons

Misinterpretation

Certainly, there are many reasons to have a chatbot, but sometimes when a customer’s question is not too clear, a chatbot may not be able to help, resulting in user irritation.  Consequently, customer experience suffers and this can negatively impact a company’s image.

Limited Functionality

Chatbots are designed to respond to simple customer questions automated by the developer and have limited responses. So, sometimes they’re not able to answer queries that require cognitive thinking. This means the customer is left with no solution and has to eventually contact the support team.

Chatbots can be Expensive

Installing chatbots can be a very costly process. Chatbots vary for different types of businesses. Some chatbots with limited resources might be low-cost but then again, they can lead to user frustration and impact customer experience.

Chatbots don’t fit in every Business

Some businesses can be far too complex to utilize a chatbot. It’s legitimate to use chatbots as a way to cut costs and augment benefits, but the potential drawbacks should also be considered prior to adding them to a business.

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What is a Chatbot?

posted on June 26, 2021

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Learn more about Chatbots → http://ibm.biz/chatbot-guide Learn more about AI → http://ibm.biz/learn-ai Learn more about Natural Language Processing → http://ibm.biz/nlp-guide Check out IBM Watson Assistant → http://ibm.biz/ibm-watson-assistant Check out IBM Cloud Pak for Data → http://ibm.biz/cp-for-data Earn a badge and create your own FREE Chatbot → http://ibm.biz/build-your-own-chatbot By now most of us have interacted with […]