Do you own a Magento web store that is not properly optimized for the mobile devices? Well, then you are missing a vast part of the market! Wondering why? Well, in today's tech-savvy era, most of the people are using smartphones and according to some ongoing market survey, most of the people today prefer to use mobile phones than PCs or laptops. You can obviously devise your online store in a responsive nature so that it works perfectly on any device.
However, when you can come up with an innovative mobile app for your online store, that would not only help you to enhance your business prospects but would help you to get a customer base as well. Here is an in-depth guide for you to convert a successful Magento online store into a business-driven and user-centric mobile application.
Select a Proper Development Methodology and Team
You would need a highly efficient and experienced development team to work on this project. Flexibility of the developers would signify a lot in this case as they should have a knowledgeable knowledge on both Magento as well as mobile app development process. There are some organizations out there that have instant conversion programs that would pull out all data from the Magento online store and would integrate into an efficient mobile app. However, this would give you some basic functionalities only. To come up with more functionalities and features, it is advisable to take guidance from some experienced developers.
Keep the Checkout Process Simple
You can not design the checkout process of the mobile application as same as the checkout process of your web store. Usually, in the checkout process of a Magento store, the users need to fill up a lot of detailed information. In the case of mobile application, you can ask the users to sign up from their relevant accounts in various social media. Thus, the application would pull necessary user's data. While paying for the purchased items, you should ask the users to go with option of saving the details to the application. In this way, once they input the details, from the next time, they can buy things with just one or two clicks.
Apart from all the above-mentioned cruel tips, here are some other helpful tips.
# 1 Typically, the people who would use mobile apps, would expect the application to work smoothly and instantly. Here, be careful while using various images as excessive image use may slow down the app functionalities.
# 2 Make sure that your application is offering the users the utmost security. Update it with the up-tp-date Magento version, use necessary encryption. More importantly, before installing any extension, make sure you are getting it from trusted and verified sources.
# 3 According to a survey, the percentage of right-handed people is between 70% to 90%. Wondering how is this relevant? Well, you need to devise the app-interface in such a way so that most of the people find navigating the app thumb-friendly.