7 Ways To Create A Phenomenal User Experience In Your Ecommerce App

Featured image of the Waterstones and Ziffit app for: 7 Ways To Create A Phenomenal User Experience In Your Ecommerce App

If you’re thinking of developing a mobile commerce app for your retail business, the biggest question you’re probably asking yourself is: how do we create something our customers will genuinely want to use, and keep them coming back?

The first thing to establish before you begin any app development work is who your customers are. This includes age, buying habits, what matters to them in their day-to-day lives, what their pain points and frustrations are, what their emotional triggers are, and how they prefer to engage with your brand and products.

In this blog, we’ll be taking a look at 7 key ways you can create a phenomenal customer experience when it comes to your app, starting with understanding your audience, and taking you through the process of tailoring your app design and ongoing development to meet their needs.

1. Use empathy mapping

An empathy map is a way of creating a visual representation of your target customer. It’s a way of categorising what they say, think, feel and do in order to gather all the information you have about a particular target audience. This facilitates an understanding of their needs and helps you with your decision-making.

Using demographic data from your website visitors, customer base, and social media audiences as a baseline, start to build a more detailed picture of your customer’s habits by asking questions like:

  • Where else do they shop?
  • What are their goals and values?
  • What publications do they read?
  • What social media do they use?

This kind of information is crucial for your retail app design process, as the most successful apps integrate into peoples’ day-to-day-lives, and ideally make their lives easier.

2. Have an easy sign-up process

When it comes to app sign up, it’s great if you can make use of integration with other apps such as Facebook or Google in order to speed up the account creation process. Marketplace platform Etsy is just one example of a retailer that allows you to create an account using the information you already have stored in the Facebook App.

Etsy Ecommerce app example blog6

3. Make purchases (and repeat purchases) easy

A big part of why people choose to shop through an ecommerce app is the ease it offers them when it comes to repeat purchases. They can store payment information, delivery addresses, and other preferences in one place, as well as buy items with a fingerprint or face recognition through integrations like ApplePay.

A bad checkout experience that’s confusing or inconvenient is the number one reason for abandoned baskets. After all, how often do you shop with Amazon because of that one-click purchase?

Keep your checkout page clear and simple, the payment process intuitive, and integrate with mobile payment functionality – including stored card information as well as mobile payment systems including Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, or Amazon Pay. Above all, make it as easy as possible for customers to purchase by requiring as little information as possible.

4. Create a seamless user journey

If the journey of your app flows seamlessly and intuitively from start to finish, you’ll find your customers are more likely to spend time exploring the full potential of what your app has to offer.

From ease of sign-up, to a great browsing experience, to a clean and simple checkout page, there may be a lot of steps to consider – and you’ll want to make sure every step is as intuitive as possible. Ensure that as part of your app development process, you map this comprehensively and invest in thorough user testing to identify obstacles.

What’s important within your user journey will depend on your audience, and what will deliver them the best experience. If your target customers are older, then an intuitively organised basket with clear step-by-step instructions might be really important for you, or if your target market are younger digital natives, perhaps fun graphics and animations will be what they’re expecting.

5. Make use of personalisation

Personalisation is a growing expectation when it comes to ecommerce apps. With the data your customers provide you with through their account – birthdays, browsing history, past purchases – you can leverage all this in your ongoing app development to provide a truly unique service.

It’s long been the case in any industry that a personalised service encourages people to spend more money and keep coming back. This can be as simple as having browsing data inform the items your app suggests to your customers when they log in, or sending them a push notification to wish them a happy birthday with a special discount code attached. It’s the little details that matter.

6. Reward loyalty

The longer your customers have been with you, the more they engage with your retail app, and the more they buy from you, the more offers and benefits they’ll expect to receive. If you aren’t rewarding your customer loyalty in your app somehow, you’re likely to lose out to competitors who are.

Whether you’re sending special discount codes on customer anniversaries, or allowing customers to build up loyalty points to exchange for money off items, customers will expect a reason to continue using your app above your mobile site, or shopping with your competitors.

7. Ensure privacy

Privacy is an ever-growing concern when it comes to our digital lives. You will need to be clear with your users about how their data is stored, and make sure their information is as secure as possible. Your customers should know what data you have access to, what you might be sharing with other apps, and what it’s up to them to protect.

You’ll need a clear privacy policy, especially if you’re allowing in-app payments, then find a place in your sign up process to share it with your customers and secure their agreement. If possible, protect customer information by requiring a fingerprint or face recognition to log in.




Creating A Retail App?

We can take you through every stage of the app development process and leave you with a finished product that functions beautifully for both you and your customers.

Find out more about our app design services here.

Too long to read now?

Sign up to our mailing list and have this content delivered to your inbox.