The e-commerce market is growing rapidly, and many online stores invest in mobile commerce (m-commerce) by developing mobile applications. M-commerce involves selling and purchasing through mobile applications — e-stores and marketplaces.
Since your main e-commerce shop is growing and the number of sales is increasing, a mobile application is a necessary extension of an online shop. It will help to improve the shopping experience of your customers and increase the sales of your shop.
Magento has an internal functionality for developing a mobile app that will be fully integrated with your Magento store. In this article, we will overview the tools and give you a guideline on how to create a Magento mobile app.
Why You Need a Mobile App for your Magento Shop?
In 2021, e-commerce and mobile shopping experienced unprecedented growth. By May 2021, Android users have spent 2 billion hours shopping — up to 51% of the pre-pandemic level. The average basket size reached $78 that is 22% more than in the previous year.
Mobile commerce sales are expected to reach $3.56 trillion in 2021 that is 22.3% more than in 2020 ($2.91 trillion). The share of mobile commerce purchases increased to 72.9% (compared to 52.4% in 2016).
The growth of mobile commerce can be explained by the convenience of mobile shopping: 76% of respondents say that mobile shopping saves them time. At the same time, 90% of mobile retail app users say that their shopping experience might be improved.
So, by not having a mobile e-commerce app, you refuse to provide your customer with more comfortable conditions for shopping and bring you more revenue. Developing a mobile application used to be a lengthy and costly process, and not many small businesses could afford to do this. With Magento mobile app builder, it will be far more quick and affordable to design your own application and give the customers better conditions for shopping.
Magento mobile apps features
Without any doubt, Magento is one of the most popular and feature-rich platforms for e-commerce development. It is adopted by more than 190,000 small and large businesses all over the world. Over 13,000 Magento websites are in the top 1 million sites on the Internet. Even the world leaders like Nestle, Coca-Cola, Nike, etc. use Magento for maintaining their online stores.
With the growth of mobile commerce, it’s particularly important to have mobile-optimized stores and invest in Magento mobile app development.
Within the last years, Magento applications have surpassed mobile websites. Even the fastest and the most responsive mobile website can never compare with the responsiveness and speed of a mobile application. Magento mobile application improves the shopping experience of your customer, increases sales, and brand loyalty. Let’s consider the benefits of a Magento mobile app in more detail.
Easy dashboard management
Magento Mobile App Builder provides you with a comprehensive admin panel with modules to customize according to your requirements. Here you can look through sales reports, see the average order value, number of orders, total number of sales, stock availability, etc. In case you have many stores, you can manage them from a centralized dashboard.
Inventory management on the go
While you grow your business, it’s necessary to track product inventory and keep the goods available in stock. There is a Magento extension available that helps you to view, add, and edit the stock, helping you always to control it.
Instant notifications
Having a mobile Magento application, you need a system that will keep you updated regarding the new orders, stock state, or any other important events. Once you open the notification on your smartphone, you can react immediately. You also can interact with your customers and answer their queries, being proactive and answering their requests.
Customer management
Interacting with the customers becomes easier if you have their contact details available. In Magento mobile app, you have Customer modules available and can manage the user account details from your backend. It’s also possible to send emails and notifications within the system. You should remember that each customer interaction is important and can influence your sales.
Sales tracking
From a mobile application, you can access the products and orders with all billing and shipping details. It also helps you to generate invoices for your orders whenever you want. In case you need to see the sales of the previous week, month, or any other dates, you also can get the report.
Single-page checkout
The checkout process on the website can be lengthy which leads to abandoned carts, despite that the customer likes the products. On a mobile app for Magento, you can add a single-page checkout that will make the paying process easier and decrease the cart abandonment rate.
Personalization
Customers are more likely to buy from a company offering a personalized shopping experience. You can offer personalization based on the user’s interests, previous purchases, location, etc. The mobile app can help to define their preferences at the start of using the app and display customized offers. You can also use the customer information for sending emails with personalized offers and discounts.
Analytics and reporting
Magento offers rich reporting features for checking the statistics of sales, items in the cart, inventory, customer behavior, abandonment rate, etc. The app can generate comprehensive reports on customized parameters that will help you to monitor the business rates and to adjust your strategy correspondingly.
Magento PWA
Progressive Web App (PWA) is a type of website that functions like an application right in a mobile browser. Now PWAs are supported by all big browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Explorer. Why is it a good choice to create a mobile app from a website?
Availability
PWA websites can work on low connection speed and autonomously. All the queries are sent to the server and will be processed after the connection is restored.
Security
With HTTPS protocol, PWAs are better protected from hacker attacks and other malicious actions
High speed
With a special caching feature, PWA loads in less than 3 seconds, including heavy content like animation or video.
Magento offers a set of tools for developing, deploying, and maintaining a progressive app — Magento PWA Studio. It can be integrated with your Magento shop to improve the shopping experience of your customers.
Best Magento Mobile App Builders
Magento mobile app builder is a solution transforming your e-commerce website into an Android or iOS app that can be downloaded from the app store. The builder provides all the necessary tools for mobile development that allow the creation of a mobile app without deep coding knowledge. We have compared several Magento e-commerce app builders for you to choose the best one.
SimiCart
It is fully integrated with Magento and allows the building of a complete iOS or Android application. SimiCart also provides the functionality to track your sales and execute the marketing strategies. You can configure the layout and functionality of your app from Magento backend, so you don’t require much coding skills to use SimiCart.
Magestore
With Magestore, you can strengthen your application with great UI\UX design, a smooth checkout process, synchronizing the data across the different devices. The app functionality will help you to engage the users and to promote your app globally.
Mininest
With Mininest, you can build a Flutter mobile application without deep technical knowledge. The tool provides you with an interface of good quality, ready-to-use themes, and smart text and voice search. The customers will be able to easily log in with Facebook or Google accounts.
Mobikul
It gives you a feature of real-time synchronization of products, customers, orders between your Magento website and a native Android \ iOS mobile app. This solution is easy to configure, supports default Magento product types, and provides advanced search
Knowband
The Knowband solution allows you to release your native shopping app without the need for coding. It is fully compatible with Magento latest version, allows you to synchronize the data of your website and mobile application. The app is able to work offline and provides you with multiple promotion options and inventory management functionality.
How to Create Your Own Magento 2 Mobile App?
Since now you know everything about the benefits and features of Magento mobile applications, we will give you a brief guideline on creating an app on your own.
Create a mobile interface
Remember that your app design should be convenient and attractive. Magento offers a great number of themes and design templates for creating an interface for your app. With Magento app builders, you will be able to choose a theme and customize it according to your needs, getting a pleasant and user-friendly application.
Integrate the necessary features
Before starting app development, make research and decide which features are the most critical for your Magento mobile application. The fundamental ones are searching, checkout process, social media integration, notifications. Optional ones are inventory management, promotion, reporting, sales tracking. Make sure that your mobile app builder provides the ones you need.
Install the shopping app with API credentials
For in-app purchases, you can integrate to your shopping app such API credentials like SOAP and Rest API from Magento 2
Publish the application to App Store or Google play
Once you are ready with this, the users will be able to download your application and make their first purchases
Introduce engaging features
The users prefer the applications that help them to chat and share products with their friends. By introducing a real-time chat, you will be able to provide immediate customer support. Push notifications are also a must-have since you will be able to use them for delivering important messages to the users, notify them about discounts and give other offers
How Much Does it Cost to Build a Magento Mobile App?
It’s impossible to calculate the exact price of developing the Magento mobile app once and for all. The total cost depends on the app feature set and is defined individually for each customer. Yet, we are able to calculate the starting amounts
Core Magento mobile app
A basic Magento app has a simple design based on one of the default themes, doesn’t have integration with the back-office system. Its functionality is plain as well — adding products, managing the pages, synchronization, checkout. The price of building such an app will start from $3000.
Custom Magento mobile app
Here you can add to your app any features you wish. You can add custom product attributes, localize the app to many languages, add currencies from all over the world, integrate with social media, add inventory management functions, track sales reports, conduct marketing activities.
Naturally, this app will require a more advanced design that will start from $1000. App development and testing will start from $3000 (depending on the functionality. Its maintenance will cost between $500-$1000. Generally, the starting sum of developing an advanced Magento mobile app is $5000.
Conclusion
Now you know how the Magento mobile application can benefit your business. In case you want to build an app on your own, you need to select a Magento app builder and select its future functionality. Even if you don’t have advanced coding skills, the app builders will help you to create a simple, but attractive app.
If you want a professional Magento mobile application with advanced functionality that is tailored specifically to your needs, contact our team. We will explore the possible options and select the best ones for you.
