Mobile technology has brought about drastic changes in our lives. As we all use smartphones today for various purposes – ranging from making phone calls, texting, video calling, socializing, and gaming to shopping, learning new skills, investing banking, and much more. A lot of things have now become easy, all because of these smartphones. The popularity of smartphones has increased manifold with the advent of online shopping trends and ecommerce, in particular. In fact, we can say that the trends of mobile ecommerce applications are fast evolving these days. With consumer buying behaviors changing drastically over the past many years, mobile commerce is expected to thrive in years to come as well.

Consumer buying behavior has changed drastically over the years, and mobile commerce will continue to thrive in the future. The popularity of online shopping can be estimated by the increasing demand for e-commerce application development across the globe. Mobile commerce and e-commerce are expanding at a phenomenal pace and the pandemic has further propelled this growth. Now people, more than ever before, are shopping online and using mobile apps and mobile websites for various purposes.

If you also own an online store or want to start one, you must ensure that you are always informed and updated about the latest trends in the domain. Whether you hire an open-source development company or Magento developers or other platforms for selling online, you cannot do without mobile app users today. Mobile app users tend to convert into buyers more than website or web app users. So, as a business, you stand to gain more by having a mobile app for your e-commerce business than just having a website or a web app.

In this post, I am going to discuss the trends, costs, and tips to build a mobile e-commerce app that sells best in 2021.

Here are the trends that are expected to dominate in the year 2021.

• Shopping through mobile apps: These days, it is common to see a lot of customers shopping through mobile devices. Considering the current trends, we can say that the mobile commerce trend is here to stay for many more years to come. The way we see people using their mobile devices for shopping is changing.

If we compare, more than half of online shoppers today prefer using mobile apps to the traditional websites or web apps for placing an order. This is certainly a game-changer for most online store owners. You can hire Magento developers or Shopify developers to create your m-commerce shopping cart.

While mobile apps can help you generate more sales than a website or web app, it doesn’t mean e-commerce websites are of no or little use. On the contrary, you can multiply your sales and revenues by having both a mobile app and a website. Expert website development services offered by a trusted e-commerce development company can help you set up your online store on the web as well as mobile platforms.

So, you can build a mobile-friendly e-commerce website as well as a mobile app to ensure that you don’t miss a sale just because your store was not accessible on either of the two platforms. For starters, a vast majority of consumers like to shop via mobile apps than mobile websites. Hence, having a mobile app for your online store gives your customers an opportunity to shop conveniently through their mobile devices in just a few taps and swipes. Mobile shopping applications convert more visitors into buyers than mobile websites.

So, it is not an overstatement if we say that the growth of m-commerce will depend largely on apps. You, therefore, need a mobile app in 2021 for staying competitive. Creating an app puts you on a competitive edge but if you continue delaying your app decision, you will definitely fall miles behind your competition.

• Sales through tablets and smartphones: As mobile shopping continues to rise, there is no wonder that smartphone sales will rule the year 2021. Consumers, today, shop more via apps than they did ever before. The order value on average from apps is much more than a mobile website.

However, mobile websites and apps can be easily accessed via multiple devices. You can categorize mobile devices in two viz. tablets and smartphones. By the end of the year 2021, it is expected that about $221 billion m-commerce sales would come from smartphones in comparison to the $42 billion from tablets. Smartphones are expected to continue dominating tablet sales in the years to come as well.

Read the blog- Reasons How a Mobile App Can Boost Ecommerce Business Revenue

When you create a mobile commerce app for your Magento store with the help of your Magento e-commerce development company, you can connect with the app users by sending push notifications to your customers. The notifications should have real-time discounts and offer based on location, buying behavior, and such factors.

• Ordering in just a click: As the customers are making a swift shift to online shopping via mobile apps, the checkout process will become easy in 2021. Shopping online and placing an order requires a lot of information from the customers, especially when using websites to do this. Think about this! The information you had to provide when transacting on Magento store included customer name, credit card details (card number, expiration date, verification number), shopping address, email address, billing address, etc. Keying in all this information manually for every order required users to spend a lot of time on placing orders every time they needed to buy something. This is quite inconvenient if we compare with the immense convenience that mobile devices offer. You may hire the best web development company to create your online store’s web app.

That is amongst the top reasons why the rate for shopping cart abandonment is so high in comparison to mobile websites. Most shopping carts are abandoned due to this. In comparison, mobile app carts are abandoned only about 20% time.

An m-commerce app lets you store your customers’ info on their user profiles (which only they can access when needed). So, when they need to place an order, they do not have to enter the tedious details again every time manually. Ordering in one click allows customers to place an order in just one tap or click. Isn’t that a great scenario for the customers and sellers both?

As a merchant, conversions will multiply whereas customers will benefit immensely because they don’t have to keep entering the same information repeatedly if you have a mobile app. They can look for what they want to buy and place an order in just a few seconds directly from their m-commerce apps. Other than this, customers shop in an app-spend at least twice more than the customers when they buy from a mobile website or desktop device.

Ordering in one click virtually eliminates the need for checkout. We will soon see more e-commerce businesses making use of this technology in the years to come.  This is not possible without a mobile commerce app. Hence, building an m-commerce app with the help of a trusted e-commerce development company will be the first thing you must do to achieve desired success in your online selling business in the year 2021. So, this is another trend worthy of being watched out for in 2021.

• Social commerce: Most brands, for several years, have been making use of social media to spread their brand awareness and get greater exposure. I am quite sure and I truly hope that you can leverage the vastly popular social media to boost your online business’ profits, sales, and revenues. While there is no denying that social media has a massive upside, there are challenges also for businesses to convert their social media traffic into actual sales. There has been a lot of friction among customers who keep navigating from product pages to social posts and vice versa. However, social commerce has evolved over the years.

With Facebook’s shoppable pages and Instagram’s shoppable posts, a lot of customers can buy their chosen products directly through the ads they see on social channels. These are the features that allow businesses to tag their products in various posts just as we tag people to our posts.

App users just need to click on the products they want to buy and they can place the order without having to open a web browser, visit the website, and look for the products they want to buy. Social commerce makes it easy for businesses to convert visitors into buyers and eliminate the pain points in the e-commerce conversion process.

Let’s quickly discuss what businesses must consider: your customers are using social media almost daily, so you can easily reach them compared to waiting for your potential buyers to visit your website one fine day, browse your products, and place their orders. Hence, social media is a great platform that provides countless opportunities for businesses to generate greater sales and earn more profits.

• Shopping via voice: Voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri are gaining quite a popularity of late. Moreover, there has been a big shift in the way voice search is used now. At first, voice search was used mainly for things such as weather-related questions or for asking their smart speakers and other devices to play music. Voice search for shopping should become quite common in the e-commerce sector in 2021. It is expected to cross $40 bn. mark by the year 2022. That is way up from a modest roughly $2 bn. in 2018 that is more than a 1,900% rise in just four years.

This should have a huge impact on m-commerce, especially if we consider the fact that over 40% of adults are now using voice search at least once or twice a day. More than 20% of all mobile searches these days are voice-based. Over 51% of people use voice options for research products and about 22% of people make use of voice search for making a purchase.

Well, this is just a glimpse of what more is to come in terms of shopping via voice trend in 2021 and beyond. As a Magento store owner, you can consider this while making key business decisions such as hiring an e-commerce development company for your website or mobile app development project. For startups, your app and website must offer voice search options today to stay ahead of your competition and establish yourself in the industry. This is especially true because a lot of users don’t have smart speakers but they can still access voice assistance and voice search from their mobile phones. Hence, we can say that voice shopping or shopping via voice is going to be another key trend in 2021.

• Chatbots: For years, chatbots have been there and most of us already have the experience of interacting with these chatbots for various reasons. A lot of businesses, especially ecommerce, have been making use of chatbots to ensure no customer query goes unattended at any time. Chatbots are also a growing trend in the ecommerce and mobile commerce sector.

Despite the fact that chatbots are so common and a regular part of our lives, there is still a long way for the chatbots to find place in the mobile world. Modern mobile applications are not making use of chatbots massively but the trend will change in the year 2021. Some of the greatest benefits of chatbots include 24/7 service, instant response for consumers, answer to common as well as complex questions, quick resolution of complaints, easy communication, expert/detailed answers, approachability & friendliness, and a great customer experience.

• AR & VR: Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have become quite popular buzzwords in the technology sphere of late now. There are endless opportunities for such technologies today. Apps for mobile shopping have started using AR for improving their customers’ shopping experience. For example, if a business sells furniture or other commodities online, it can make use of augmented reality for showcasing what a product will look like in the home of a customer and even check whether certain dress or accessory will look good on them not? It is expected that the year 2021 will see a lot more of augmented reality and virtual reality.

Other trends to follow this year are omnichannel mobile shoppers, mobile payments, etc.

How much does it cost to build a mobile app?

For regular mobile e-commerce application development with a basic UI and a must-have, limited set of features falls somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000, whereas for building medium complexity, feature-rich app, you may have to incur somewhere around $61,000-$120,000 and for building highly complex project, you should be ready to spend at least $120,000.

In short, the cost of building your mobile commerce application will depend entirely on the features and level of complexity you want in your app, the platforms on which you want to launch the app, the e-commerce development company you hire, and other factors.

Tips to building great mobile e-commerce apps

While a lot of mobile apps are built and launched almost every day, not all of them are as successful and popular among users as some of the top apps. If you also want to build your mobile app business and want to ensure its success, here are a few quick tips to help you do that.

• Know your targeted audiences: This is the most important aspect of mobile app development. Identifying your audiences is the key to building a successful app.
• Ensure your app offers value: Just think why would users want to download, install, and use your app on their mobile devices if it doesn’t offer them the desired value? So, make sure your app makes things better for them.
• Make your business model clear and define the scope of features in your app: This will help you get a clear vision of how your app will look, feel, and perform.
• Pick the right technology: Whether you want to build a simple or a complex app, you must ensure to pick the right technology or technology stack that helps you build the app you have envisioned.
• Build a simple yet intuitive user interface and user experience: The user interface of an app refers to its aesthetics and look & feel and it is the key to keeping the users engaged. On the other hand, you cannot ignore the value of a great user experience which is basically how easy to use and intuitive is the app. So, the UI/UX of your mobile app can help you engage and acquire more customers and boost your overall sales & profits.
• Choose your design & development team with care: Whether you hire Magento developers to build your app or a fully-fledged e-commerce development company for creating your mobile commerce app, take time to learn about their expertise, skills, past projects, existing and previous clientele, etc.
• Keep your message clear: When hiring a company to build your mobile ecommerce app, make sure you explain your app requirements & expectations clearly, discuss the cost, timeline, and other key factors before you give out your project to the developers or development agency.

Other than these, you must also focus on app security, third-party integrations, result-oriented marketing strategy, linking the app with social media, and upgrading the app on regular basis.