Developing a successful e-commerce app feels overwhelmingly complicated when you consider the ever-growing demand for innovation and faultless functionality. As it happens, about 70% of online shoppers abandon the cart due to either poor user experience or technical issues. So, if you have an experienced software development company working on your project you can depend on their expertise and insights.  

Let’s look at the common challenges faced during e-commerce app development and the steps that need to be taken to overcome them.

Challenges in Developing a Successful E-commerce App

1. Ensuring Seamless User Experience

An online retailer, who has customers that mostly browse and buy products on mobile phones. If an application is slow or difficult to use, users simply abandon their carts, meaning lost sales. This happens all too often, especially in the case of applications not optimized for smartphones or if the app is badly designed making it difficult for buyers to navigate their way through to a purchase. 

Solution

In addressing this, the design of an app needs to focus on ease of navigation, loading speed, and responsiveness over a range of screen sizes. The emphasis is on simplicity, creating a clean layout where the product is easy to find and checkout hassle-free and only takes a few steps. Developers have to test the performance of the app both on fast and slower connections to check for lag.

Apart from this, adding real-time feedback, such as loading indicators, will serve to manage user expectations and hence improve retention. Including responsive customer service options, such as chatbots or live chats, further improves user interaction and satisfaction since they offer the user instant help.

2. Real-time Inventory Management

Real-time inventory control is a challenge while building e-commerce apps, especially for those businesses that operate both online and offline. For example, stores dealing in unique items may face the headache of managing incoming and outgoing stock. This may result in an item showing ‘available’ on the website, when in reality it has already been sold at the physical store. Dissatisfied customers will be greatly annoyed by such a thing, and perhaps will go elsewhere to fulfill their needs.

Solution

The e-commerce app needs to be integrated with an efficient inventory management system, which gets updated in real-time. The cloud-based solutions track stock across various channels and instant changes get reflected. Automated triggers can send notifications to the business owner when the stock is running out, preventing over-selling and out-of-stock situations.

Also, offering app features like back-in-stock notifications will keep your customers interested and engaged. AI can further hone inventory management by anticipating demand trends, ensuring you are adequately stocked without over-investing in slow-moving items.

3. Handling Diverse Payment Methods

Customers today expect that the e-commerce applications they use will have various payment options, accommodating the preferences of diverse users around the world. An online retailer might find out prospective shoppers in different locations abandon their carts as they have not found their preferred local methods of payment or currencies on the retailer’s e-commerce app. Not offering payment method variety limits sales and discourages international customers from completing purchases.

Solution

Now, this challenge can be overcome if e-commerce development provides an integrated payment gateway that supports a series of payment methods- from credit cards and digital wallets to local payment solutions for different regions. Partnership with reliable payment service providers having secure multi-currency gateways can sort this out easily.

Also, it is highly important to make sure these payment gateways are secure and follow local regulations such as GDPR or PCI DSS. Numerous in-app payment options, like one-click checkout or saved payment methods, improve the user experience, making the buying process easier and more secure. Moreover, installment payment options or “Buy Now, Pay Later” plans will attract a wider range of customers and will increase conversions.

4. Ensuring Security and Data Privacy

Another major concern while developing an e-commerce application is security breaches. For instance, an online store may come across a cyberattack and thereby have their customer data leaked to hackers. This creates a huge loss in terms of trust and reputation. Obviously, users in this hyper-connected world are very concerned regarding their personal information’s safety; hence, such a breach may turn out to be unfavorable for any e-commerce business trying to make their mark in a competitive environment.

Solution

Implementation of high-level security features such as SSL encryption, two-factor authentication, and periodic security audits goes a long way in securing your e-commerce app. Compliance with basic data protection regulations such as GDPR is equally essential. Data encryption for sensitive information like credit card details, tokenization of payment details-are some of the ways to reduce the threat of data theft.

5. Maintaining App Performance and Scalability

One of the common issues is how to keep up the performance of an app once the user base starts growing. Let’s say, for instance, a local delivery service goes online and launches an e-commerce app, getting through the early tests smoothly. If scalability is not built into the app, once their customers grow, the app will either crash during peak hours or become sluggish. Both the users and the brand’s reputation suffers.

Solution

Scalability would be required from the very beginning, when your e-commerce app is still being developed. Scaling would be automated with the use of cloud infrastructure like AWS or Google Cloud during periods when the demand spikes, and it will not compromise the performance.

Load balancing and performance monitoring tools will make sure that bottlenecks are caught well in advance before users are affected. Simulating a heavy traffic environment, regular stress tests can be done, a vital step in figuring out how the application acts under various scenarios. Optimizing backend processes like database queries and server-side code will go a long way in helping improve speed and reliability as your e-commerce app continues to grow.

6. Personalizing the Shopping Experience

Today’s customers are looking for personalized experiences. This may be hard to offer to e-commerce businesses operating across diversified audience sets. For instance, a skincare brand may have its customers with varied needs based on skin type, preference, and climate. Offering each of these users a generic shopping experience would contribute to lower conversion rates.

Solution

Backed by machine learning, your online store’s app needs to be configured to offer personalization to users. It should suggest recommendations tailored to each user. These may be informed by browsing history, earlier purchases, and even real-time behavior. Other types of dynamic content include product recommendations, personalized promotions, and customized landing pages that enhance the user experience and lead to better sales. 

This is further supported by push notifications, offering users personalized discounts or updates about user preferences. Also, building user profiles to store preferences may make browsing easier for customers because they will not repeatedly be made to provide their information each time they access the app. 

7. Dealing with Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment has been one of the biggest issues in e-commerce, with scores of customers abandoning their carts before completing a purchase. Often sellers notice customers putting several items in their cart, only to abandon those items at the last stage due to unexpected shipping costs or extra lengthy checkout processes.

Solution

Reducing the steps involved in the checkout process is crucial to minimizing cart abandonment rates. For this your e-commerce app needs to be designed with minimal steps for customers to complete a purchase, including a convenient guest checkout option, as well as transparency via an upfront display of the estimated shipping fees.

An automated cart abandonment email or push notifications remind the user about the pending purchase, probably with an added discount as an incentive. Provide multiple payment options, and also show security badges to reassure customers so they won’t be hesitant at checkout. Adding a ‘save item for later’ features will ensure that your customers do not feel compelled to make a decision quickly.

8. Managing Logistics and Fulfillment 

Logistics and fulfillment have to be handled in a highly efficient way. To say that there are a lot of moving parts, would be understatement. If there is an online seller that fails to ship perishable goods in time, the items are bound to get spoiled, leaving customers highly unsatisfied. It is quite complicated and expensive to efficiently manage the entire supply chain from warehousing to last-mile delivery.

Solution 

This could be sorted out by partnering with reliable logistics providers and with a strong e-commerce app that is made to automate the fulfillment process and smoothen operations. The app’s real-time tracking feature allows for better management and transparency of on-time delivery. A distributed warehousing system, where inventory is stored in multiple locations closer to the customers will also cut down on shipping times and costs. 

Third-party fulfillment center integrations with the app will also allow it to scale operations during busy periods, such as holidays. Also, different delivery options, such as express, same-day, or standard delivery, can be provided during e-commerce development, offering flexibility to customers, drastically raising the level of customer satisfaction. 

With an experienced e-commerce app development company working on your project, you can be assured that your e-commerce app is completely optimized. Request a free consultation with Branium’s experts.