The past decade has witnessed a huge increase in users shifting to online shopping. E-commerce as a percentage of total retail sales worldwide has seen persistently rising and is projected to reach around 24.5% by 2025. Amid the rising demand and competition to meet it, so many developers worldwide are struggling to develop e-commerce portals and apps accepted by the users and preferred over the competitors’ products.
If you are a business planning to develop an e-commerce app, you should prepare yourself to overcome certain challenges before you make your place in this ever-growing e-commerce market.
E-commerce Challenges for Businesses to Overcome
Here is a list of the crucial e-commerce challenges to prepare for.
Competition
E-commerce development is not as simple as just analyzing user requirements and starting development based on that. There is enormous competition in the market, and just a good ecommerce app won’t assure success unless it captures the market better than the competitors.
Competitor Analysis
The first challenge in e-commerce development is to study the market leaders, their market share, features, reviews, and limitations. The trick is to work on these limitations and remove them. This is how you can encash on the opportunity to make an app that satisfies the customer more than the leading apps. Otherwise, there is hardly any probability of the customers quitting their favorite apps and switching to yours. To summarize, competitor analysis is the first stage and challenge for e-commerce development.
Driving Adequate Traffic
Even if your app has better features than the competitor's, the users must know about it. So, you have to ensure to drive traffic to your app, mainly as other players are already occupying the SERPs, and you need your share of visibility. For this, you must work out a comprehensive search engine optimization and marketing plan that aims at placing your app in the top ranks of the searches and better than your benchmark competitors.
User Preferences
Assuming that you successfully bring your e-commerce app to market and even to the search engine rankings, the next challenge is to make the user journey comfortable. Big data analytics helps study user behavior and preferences. However, such studies are very time-consuming, and only the best big data analytics services can bring the desired results.
Conversions
After trying various ways of generating leads, the next challenge is to convert these leads to customers. Businesses are aware that conversion is complicated to achieve in an environment of heavy competition. Buyers browse a lot before making the final purchase. Moreover, many take a lot of time and look for different sources for the same products before selecting one. So, the challenge does not stop at lead generation through effective advertising and marketing campaigns. User experience design will determine whether you or your competitor will win the conversion.
User Experience Design
User experience design is not a limited set of activities, or best practices businesses can follow to make a successful app. Designing a good user experience for your app is challenging and requires considering many factors. While some elements of user experience design are common to most apps, different industries have different requirements for user experience design. Moreover, each element has its challenges.
Easy and Multi-language Search
Users have different needs and ways of searching for the products they need. A successful e-commerce app ensures that the user can find the intended product in the least possible time. It is a challenge because it requires comprehensive knowledge of user search intent and patterns. The app has to offer easy search with multiple keyword phrases, including long and short strings of keywords. The app must also incorporate multi-language search to allow users to search for products in their language.
Navigation
Most shoppers abandon their carts due to the cumbersome checkout processes and difficult navigation. So, for e-commerce developers, one of the crucial challenges is to offer easy navigation with minimum steps leading to a quick checkout before the customer changes his mind. Good navigation might be difficult to achieve but is one of the core factors that will determine the success of your app.
Payment & Shipping
Maybe your customer can navigate through your app easily. But will he purchase if he can’t find a payment option of his choice? It is thus essential to offer multiple payment options that can cater to all needs, including payment by cash, card, internet banking, etc. Then, e-commerce businesses must also have a well-defined shipping policy that is at par or even better than the competitors’.
Return or Replacement
The challenge for e-commerce providers doesn’t end at the shipping of the product. E-commerce players must incorporate policies for easy replacement or returns in their apps to ensure that the customers’ buying mistakes are taken care of. Refunds of returned products should be quick and easy.
Security
Any portal that accesses sensitive user data must ensure security. There are various elements of security for e-commerce portals. Treating each of these as crucial ensures that the final e-commerce app is free from security threats and breaches.
User Verification
User Verification is the first step of the user's interaction with the e-commerce application. This step should be easy and yet assure security. Most modern applications developed with cutting-edge technologies ensure safe and secure user verification. So, it is advisable to always go for the latest technology for app development that gives confidence in security.
Profile & User Data
E-commerce apps store different types of user data, including user profile, preferences, journey, etc. While businesses collect this data to understand the user better and personalize the experience, this data is vulnerable to leaks. Users will never use apps that put their personal data at risk. Businesses must develop a policy for the storage and safety of user data. The best e-commerce developers ensure that the security features are incorporated in the application during development.
Payment Details
Most e-commerce apps access and save users’ payment details. Users are skeptical of sharing such data with apps that put their bank and card details at the risk of hacking and misuse. Thus, the top e-commerce providers put a lot of caution in handling such data. It is a challenge to assure the safety and security of this data to the customer if you have not ensured a secure app during development. Moreover, post-development, e-commerce businesses must regularly update their apps with technology upgrades to add security features with changing environments. The choice of the right technology and developers makes it easy to overcome the challenges of data and app security. So, choose an e-commerce development company with care after checking their ratings, reviews, testimonials, etc., on platforms such as GoodFirms.
Customer Loyalty
E-commerce businesses face tough competition with new players adding each day to the market. Customers are also open to switching over to new and more lucrative options. It is a challenge for businesses to earn customers' loyalty. Retaining customers is not easy. Businesses must keep themselves updated about the competition and provide services that keep the customer glued to their app. Here are a few more challenges in retaining customers.
Competitive Pricing
Pricing of products should be competitive; the customer switches over to the competitor’s app if he finds the same products for less price. With all the costs involved in managing an e-commerce business, including the maintenance and support costs, it is furthermore difficult to offer products for prices less than that of the competitor. However, the success of your app depends on price competitiveness, so you must find ways to check the product prices in comparison to the competitors. Seasonal offers and discounts for repetitive customers are a good way to manage pricing occasionally.
Customer Support
Easy access to customer support is essential to prevent customers from quitting. Customers must get a quick resolution to their queries. Maintaining good customer support is costly, but it determines the success of your e-commerce business.
Notifications
Sending notifications to the customer to remind them of their cart is an old tactic to bring them back to the app. Finding the right time and frequency for notifications is vital to prevent annoying customers. However, there is no perfect time for all customers; it varies from one customer to another. So, identifying the proper schedule for notifications is a challenge that businesses can manage with effective data analytics and personalization.
Borderless E-commerce
E-commerce businesses are striving to become leaders in borderless e-commerce. A successful global e-commerce app is complicated to maintain. Apart from the challenges mentioned above, borderless e-commerce has an additional set of challenges.
Regulatory Compliance
When you are operating an e-commerce business across countries, you have to comply with the laws and regulations of all the countries where you are targeting customers. GDPR is one of the aspects to take care of, though there are many more specific to certain countries. Taxation and invoicing rules are different for different countries, and to avoid legal troubles, businesses must study and comply with all such requirements.
Support for Multiple Currencies
Global e-commerce businesses must offer support for different currencies for the needs of customers from different countries. Countries have different currencies and payment modes. It is necessary to accommodate these differences and the systems that help integrate these into your apps.
Conclusion!
Developing a secure app is always a challenge; e-commerce apps are no exception. Moreover, as e-commerce apps store sensitive user data such as personal details, credit cards, bank details, etc., these must ensure a higher level of security to instill customer trust. Expert e-commerce developers can develop a secured and successful app that meets your requirements.
Moreover, the most popular e-commerce platforms have inherent features to take care of your needs, both in terms of features and security. Goodtal makes it easy for you to find e-commerce developers with expertise in these platforms. You can browse through Goodtal’s lists of the top BigCommerce developers, Magento developers, Shopify developers, WooCommerce developers, OpenCart developers, PrestaShop developers, etc.
Mia Ron
Senior Content CreatorMia Ron is a Senior Content Creator for Goodtal. She loves to craft technologically actionable content for business audiences.