Turning Ecommerce Website to Mobile App – React Native Development

Mobile apps have revolutionized the way businesses connect to customers and provide their services. From sending notifications about your order status to collecting customer behaviour, mobile apps have helped bridge the long-standing gap between business owners and customers in numerous ways. And all of this has significantly improved the revenue for eCommerce owners.

As per a report by Statista, mobile commerce is expected to make up almost three-quarters of net e-commerce sales.

Source: Statista

The trend has made most eCommerce owners push their mobile app strategies slightly up in the priority list. We, at The Brihaspati Infotech iOS and Android app development agency, recently built an eCommerce mobile app for one of our clients. Our experts delivered an excellent app tailored to the client’s needs.

Through this blog, we will discuss mobile app development company, the immense potential it carries, and our approach for turning an eCommerce website into a mobile app. Let’s get started.

Benefits of Creating Mobile App for eCommerce Store

Converting your eCommerce website to mobile app adds value to your online business in multiple ways such as:

• Customer Experience: A mobile phone is way easier to carry and ensures almost 24×7 connectivity with your store.
• More users on mobile: Mobile traffic dominates desktop browsing by numbers.
• User Engagement: User engagement on mobile apps is four times that on mobile web browsers.
• Personalized suggestions: Ecommerce mobile apps save past orders and searches. Offers personalized product suggestions. 
• Compare prices: Users can compare products, prices, and more without leaving your estore.
• Notifications: From seasonal sales to order updates, eCommerce mobile apps send push notifications for delivering every essential information to the customers.
• Quicker payment: Receiving OTP on the same smartphone accelerates the payment process.
• Exclusive features: A native mobile app offers more features as compared to the mobile browser version. Ecommerce apps can leverage the built-in functions of mobile phones to offer a pleasant purchase experience to the users.

Advanced features like Artificial Intelligence, Voice Recognition, and AR/VR can be integrated with mobile apps to offer a never-before customer experience.

Having said that, an eCommerce store may leave a lot of cash on the table if it doesn’t have a mobile app to complement the website. Our client wanted to launch a mobile app for the existing online store and our eCommerce mobile app developers were more than willing to help.

Explore our recent mobile app development projects

Mobile Application Development Archives

Client Requirement 

The client had an online store built on 3dCart. With thousands of products and their subsequent variants, the store had a lot on offer for their massive customer base that loved to go for repeat purchases.

Realizing the immense potential mobile commerce carries, the client wanted to offer a dedicated mobile app for the customers. The idea was to allow the customers to access the eCommerce store on their mobile, get notified regarding the offers, and make purchases. While developing an eCommerce mobile app seemed easy on papers, it definitely wasn’t.

Challenges while Developing the eCommerce Mobile App

Converting a website to a full-fledged mobile app in itself is demanding. It only gets more challenging when mobile experts are asked to develop one for the eCommerce business.

1. Migrating a large amount of data from eCommerce website to mobile app platforms.

2. Uniform user experience for the customers on desktop and mobile apps.

3. Ability to manage the products and offers from the website backend.

We resolved one roadblock at a time.

Converting eCommerce Website to Mobile App: Our Approach

Uniform Customer Experience 

One of the major differences between creating a mobile eCommerce app and an eCommerce website is the screen size. Desktops have a large screen and they can accommodate an umpteen number of elements for a given screen. 

On the other hand, mobile screens are roughly 6 times smaller than a desktop. Placing the same elements on a mobile screen, therefore, needs more strategy. The mobile app experts need to take special care of the menu, product descriptions, images, and action buttons.  

Our experts ensured that the app feels native to the users with the UI, menu options and exclusive store offerings. At the same time, we made sure that the functions aren’t cluttered on the mobile app.

To implement the same, our React Native development company came up with visually-appealing designs for every page and the features they offer. The app retains the look and feels as offered by the original store. The responsiveness of the layout and the app loading speed were some of our top priorities. 

Infinite scroll on eCommerce Mobile App

The next design challenge that we came across was the product catalogue. The online store managed its long list of products with pagination. The feature offers SEO benefits for the website and considering the size of the webpage on desktops, buttons offer convenient navigations.

This is certainly not the case with mobile phones. Every new button makes the UI more complex and cluttered.

To provide a seamless mCommerce experience, our experts offered an infinite scroll for the product catalogue. The app loads a new set of products once a user is done browsing the previous set(s). The technique allows the app to refresh the page every time a user scrolls down.

The users won’t be interrupted in the middle of their search to find a button that takes them to and fro the search pages. An infinite scrolling surely makes a handy option here.

React Native for eCommerce App Development

The client wanted the app to be equally accessed across both the leading mobileOS platforms – iOS and Android. React Native was our go-to solution for its ability to create cross-platform apps for both operating systems. 

The technology makes it easier for developers to use the same code script to design mobile apps for both platforms at once. The approach saves time and, therefore, the cost associated with developing a native app. Moreover, the technology primarily requires JavaScript which is highly popular among developers, thus significantly reducing the app deployment time.

Centralized Product Information Management

Getting a mobile app built for an online store means offering ease of use to the customers. The business owner wanted it to be a solution rather than another roadblock that would’ve demanded attention every now and then.

The original eCommerce website is the storehouse of products and their details. The client was sceptical regarding the way products will be managed across the platforms and if the website and the mobile app have the same content.

At this, we created custom APIs to fetch the required details from the eCommerce database. The APIs scrape product details such as category, images, descriptions, variants and customer reviews from the store backend. Our experts used the data to create product pages for the app.

The product images have the desired screen space – limited, yet effective. Customers can find the product image, name, price, variants and reviews on the same page.

End-users can similarly find all the products properly categorized for a seamless browsing experience. 

The custom API runs Cron jobs on a routine to ensure that the products added by the client on the store are reflected on the custom eCommerce app. The client can manage the products and their details from the store backend.

Real-time Data sync 

A fully functional eCommerce store has more than just products as data. In general, a customer has access to several in-store features such as seasonal sales, promotional coupons, order status, etc. It is very obvious they expect the same when accessing your store on the mobile app.

The client’s store offers flash sales that are time-bound and create a CTA for the users. Creating a parallel mobile app meant adding a similar flash sale feature with a synchronized countdown timer.

Our experts built custom APIs to manage the products that are placed under “Flash Sales” and their deadlines. As a result, the stopwatch is the same on the mobile app as on the website.

Stringent Testing to Deliver Stable, Bug-Free App

If you have been reading blogs around React Native technology, you must be aware that React Native has its share of complexities and vulnerabilities as well.

Our experts practise Agile methodologies for developing tailored mobile apps. Every feature is tested and re-tested until it attains perfection. We made sure the client gets a stable, bug-free, quality checked, and productive mobile app with:

• Performance and usability check
• Cross-platform testing
• App monitoring for bugs or other issues
• Cross-device checking
• Mobile app flow testing
• Load testing
• Ensuring better quality code and functionality

As a result, our app ensures that customers have a pleasant purchase experience.

While the current project revolved around React Native, our experts are capable of delivering similar eCommerce mobile apps in other mobile development technologies as well. Furthermore, we can convert your eCommerce to a mobile app regardless of the platform it is built on. 

In any case, if you feel that your eCommerce store needs enhancements or a complete touch-up, you can hire our eCommerce development team.

Our Experience with Cross-Platform Mobile App Development

The Brihaspati Infotech is a pioneer in mobile app development. In its 10+ years of experience, the agency has delivered several intuitive mobile applications tailored to bisect the client’s preferences and constraints.

The extensive exposure has helped our developers understand trending technologies, industry standards, and the guidelines to get apps published on Google Play and Apple App Store. We continually strive to deliver 100% customer satisfaction and the true value for money. 

Converting Ecommerce Website to iOS or Android App: Final Words

The world of online business has started exploring mobile apps. They are everywhere and the best is yet to come as technologies are changing every month and day. No second thought, eCommerce mobile apps are going to go places and we’d do well to follow them.

Now that you have come this far, we are certain that you too own an eCommerce website that is in dire need of a native mobile app. You can contact us today and our experts will help transform your concept into a dynamic mobile application.