Creating a Shopping App in 2022: Live Shopping, NFTs, Zero-Party Data, and Supply Chain Optimization

As a software development company, MindK is always looking for new technologies to give our customers a competitive advantage. After analyzing the e-commerce market, we uncovered 6 huge new opportunities for online retailers. How to build a shopping app by capitalizing on these promising trends.

Table of Contents:

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• Zero Party Data
• Live Stream Shopping
• Supply chain optimization
• Location Intelligence (LI)
• Web 3.0 and NFT integration
• Specialty stores

Key trends in mobile shopping app development

Here are the most promising ideas that can help you if you’re wondering how You can create an online store app that will thrive in competitive markets.

Zero Party Dates

Have you ever looked at a pair of pink Crocs on Amazon (I’m not judging) only to see the exact same shoes offered to you on every page recommended will you visit for the next twelve years? Feel free to thank third-party cookies and other tracking technologies for making this possible.

Big Tech is slowly starting to listen to privacy-conscious users. The first sign of this potentially massive change came on April 26, 2021. The iOS 14.5 update allowed users to disable any type of tracking technology for any app on their phones. That’s huge given that 55% of Americans use iOS devices. And if you think that’s bad, wait until you learn that Google has stopped supporting third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of 2023!

For many retailers, Facebook ads remain the primary customer acquisition channel. Without targeting data, they need to show ads to a much wider audience. As a result, conversion rates plummet like a lead balloon. Many brands are now reducing their advertising spend, with some companies increasing customer acquisition costs by up to 50%.

Additionally, users continue to demand an increasingly personalized experience. Without tracking technologies, this is quite difficult. So, eCommerce companies need to find another way to meet customer expectations.

And this way is called zero party data. This is the information that users voluntarily share with you. No need for third-party cookies and trackers. There are several ways to collect this data:

Recommendation Quiz

Imagine you have decided to buy a bike for a loved one. You know that a good bike should have two big wheels, a comfortable seat, and steering that looks like a big stick. After all, it’s been 20 years since you’ve used one.

But do you need a mountain bike or a fat bike? 29″ wheels or 27.5″? Carbon or aluminum? Mechanical brakes or hydraulics? Shimano or SRAM? Deore or XTR?

As your palms start to sweat, a friendly sales lady comes up to you and asks, “How can I help you?” She then asks a few simple questions to learn more about your needs and preferences. She ends up offering you a couple of bikes that are perfect for your spouse. You get a gift and the store gets a happy customer.

Recommendation Quiz is similar to this experience.

• Ask users a few questions during the onboarding process to learn more about their preferences.
• Then use this information to give them shopping recommendations.

Such quizzes have much higher conversion rates than traditional sites (30% versus just 2-4%). Get even better results by using images, gifs, and other visual elements in your quizzes.

Examples of visually appealing recommendation quizzes. Source: Octane AI

Conversational pop-ups

Let’s go back to the bike shop. Just imagine that this time when you enter the store, the clerk asks for your phone number to get a 5% discount. Sounds weird, right?

This is what pop-ups look like to most ecommerce users. They’re pushy, annoying, and don’t give a fuck about conversions.

Now it’s better to use a popup as another opportunity to learn more about your customers.

• Just ask a helpful question like “What are you looking for?“;
• Offer a nice discount to email or email to leave phone number; and
• Display product recommendations directly in the pop-up window!

Experience shows that many more people leave their contacts after answering the initial question (just ask any doorstep seller who let you hold a product during their sales pitch).

Entertainment chatbots are another alternative to interactive pop-ups that you can use to collect first-party data.

Examples of great conversational popups from different online shopping apps Source: Octane AI

Post-purchase quiz

This is another opportunity to learn more about your customers. You can ask them questions like: “Where did you learn about our app/brand?” “What did you like about the experience?” “How can we improve our services?“

The analysis of first-party data is not just about providing personalized services or targeted advertising, but a source of valuable insights – hidden vulnerabilities, unusual solutions and new business opportunities Your customer support team should add any information they receive to the company’s CRM and in subsequent interactions with Ku use.

How to create an online store that uses first-party data. Source: Octane AI

Live Stream Shopping

Remember your mom bought a pair of yellow Shamwow towels after watching a TV commercial has? Me neither.

Nevertheless, this type of shopping is making a big comeback. The pandemic has led to a huge increase in social media usage. Influencers are now collaborating with businesses to sell products during live streams on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and specialized platforms.

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According to Astound Commerce, live stream sales are up 76% less than a year. By 2026, it will account for about 20% of all e-commerce sales in the US. And that’s no surprise since live selling has up to 10x higher conversion rates than traditional ecommerce. Therefore, it is imperative for any retailer to explore live selling opportunities.

Yet, an even greater opportunity could be to build your own live selling marketplace.

Whatnot is a great case to mention here. It started out as a more traditional retailer selling Funko Pop figures online. The company soon turned to the live sales model, reaching a whopping $3.7 billion in valuation.

The app now acts as a marketplace for selling all sorts of collectibles such as: B. Rare Pokémon cards. Users can bid during live auctions or in advance, as well as purchase a rare deck of mystery cards and watch the unboxing in real-time.

Whatnot is now exploring opportunities to expand into other niches such as NFTs (which I will describe later in this article). As for profits, the company takes an 8% cut at each auction. In just half a year, the total value of items sold on the marketplace increased 30 times and there is no sign of this stopping.

Source: AppStore

PopShop Live is a live shopping startup that uses a slightly different strategy. It has achieved an impressive valuation of over $100 million by targeting Generation Z hipsters. Customers like to buy products from retailers and lesser-known brands. The number of PopShop users has grown by 500% in just three months, showing great potential for the model. Some of the merchants are now selling over $500,000 worth of goods on the platform.

Source: AppStore

Live selling isn’t just for hipsters and needy millennials like me. ShopThing is a Canadian app that sells luxury goods with the help of personal shoppers. You can watch your favorite influencer walk into a jewelry store, choose a pair of gold earrings that suit you, and buy them on your behalf. ShopThing handles the checkout and shipping for a 20% fee. As of March 2022, the app features over 100 Personal Shoppers in North America with plans for global expansion.

Source: AppStore

To create your own live shopping app, you need to combine a well-tested marketplace model with technologies for real-time video Streaming, like WebRTC. You can learn more about this amazing technology by reading an in-depth article about our WebRTC project.

Supply Chain Optimization

Most people choose Amazon because of the one-day free shipping. In fact, 73.6% of users consider excellent delivery essential to the customer experience.

Reasons for US consumers to shop on Amazon. Source: statista.com

However, as more people shop online, it becomes more difficult to deliver things on time. Behind every business is a mile-long supply chain—warehouses, shipping companies, and thousands of factories that manufacture millions of components.

In 2021 we saw this system fail in real time. Government restrictions, wild fluctuations in demand, congested ports. E-commerce companies saw their shipments delayed by weeks and months. A shortage of computer chips and other components has made goods of all kinds more expensive.

Although the situation is slowly improving, supply chains will continue to be the Achilles’ heel of e-commerce. Order processing, shipping, warehousing, logistics and inventory tracking all require human action. Luckily, there are many ways e-commerce businesses can use technology to improve their supply chains:

Make your logistics visible with inventory management software (IMS)

You can’t improve what You already don’t measure. With an IMS, you can track inventory in real time. From the moment you procure the goods to the moment you put them on a shelf in a warehouse, pack them up and ship them to happy customers.

Integrate Warehouse Management Software (WMS)

WMS is essential for businesses that own warehouses or need to manage inventory across dozens of locations. It helps to monitor daily warehouse operations, order processing and fulfillment, percentage of orders delivered on time, number of errors, orders delivered without defects, etc.

Build a returns management system

Returning damaged goods and components can cost e-commerce businesses a lot of time. Use digital tools to track damaged goods and ensure you get returns on time with minimal cost.

Implement supply chain automation

Automating tedious and time-consuming tasks is a great way to reduce costs, eliminate human error and improve your services. There are many opportunities for improvement when it comes to order processing, warehousing, inventory tracking, and shipping.

One of our clients managed hundreds of supplier catalogs with over 25 million plumbing and mechanical items. The company switched several development partners to build a supply chain solution for the US construction industry. MindK helped them create the CINX solution to digitize these catalogues. It automates order processing and data management. The system has 20+ integrations and an application programming interface (API) that allows you to connect the CINX app with other solutions.

CINX, a SaaS supply chain management solution for US construction companies [Explore the case study]

Continuous improvement through data analysis

By collecting real-time data, you can:

• Create accurate inventory forecasts to reduce transportation costs and ensure your goods are always in stock.
• Inventory measure sales, storage capacity, average inventory cost per item, delivery time, order fulfillment and other KPIs.
• Find sectors in the supply chain that need your attention.

While companies like Amazon use bespoke supply chain management solutions, not everyone has similar resources. For this reason, we often recommend Mailchimp Open Commerce (formerly Reaction Commerce) to our customers.

This is an open source platform for building e-commerce websites and progressive web applications. It allows you to create a fully custom frontend while using ready-made plugins for things like inventory, orders, carts, payment, and shipping. You can easily change anything about your user interface or business logic. All components communicate using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

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Some companies use so many different systems with different technologies and data formats that communicating with each other via APIs becomes inefficient. This situation happened to one of our customers. A leading construction company from Scandinavia had a huge IT infrastructure with dozens of customer-facing and business apps. To connect these tools, MindK has developed a data warehousing solution. It allowed these apps to exchange data quickly and made it ten times easier to integrate future components.

Location Intelligence (LI)

Location intelligence refers to the use of map and location data to improve your Services. In 2021, the Boston Consulting Group surveyed over 500 executives from industries such as logistics, retail and real estate. It turns out that leading companies in LI enjoy twice more customer satisfaction and sales volume than their competitors. 91% of respondents also believe that location intelligence will be critical to achieving business goals in the next 3-5 years.

Retailers can use location-based marketing to send targeted offers to users passing by a physical store. However, there is even greater potential for e-commerce companies to adjust prices according to differences in local price elasticity of demand.For one US grocery grab-and-go app, such a feature accounts for a quarter of the company’s revenue.

E-commerce apps can also use location intelligence to:

• Plan delivery routes.
• Streamline warehousing, workforce planning and inventory management;
• Find the best locations for warehouses and more.

According to the BCG survey cited above, location intelligence can increase the size of an e-commerce shopping cart by up to 15% and reduce the cost of delivery on the last mile by up to 4%.

Read our in-depth article on location intelligence to learn how to integrate this technology into your online store app.

An example of location intelligence to improve supply chains. Source: Geotab

Web 3.0 and NFT integration

Whether you’re a blockchain enthusiast or a big NFT skeptic, it’s worth exploring the development of Web 3.0 technologies to keep in mind.

The mid-2000s brought us a Web 2.0 revolution. It changed the internet from a collection of mostly static pages to a whole universe of interactive websites like YouTube and Facebook. But this new era of opportunity has quickly become a big tech monopoly.

For many years, crypto enthusiasts have predicted the rise of a fully decentralized internet. Despite these promises, few e-commerce companies are taking advantage of Web 3.0. Here are a few options to consider when thinking about building an online shopping app:

NFT-based loyalty programs

Shopify recently introduced the concept of token-gated Commerce introduced. A store can now restrict access to some of its products, services or promotions to people who own a specific NFT. Shopify customers can open their crypto wallets, pass the validation process, and enjoy exclusive discounts, live events, pre-orders, limited merchandise, community channels, and other benefits.

NFT trading

According to Markets and Markets, the NFT trading market will reach $13.6 billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 35%.

Shopify is one of the big e-commerce players that has decided to capitalize on this trend. It has launched a beta initiative that will make it easier for Shopify Plus stores to sell NFTs. A user can add a digital image to a shopping cart, pay with cryptocurrency or credit card, and receive a link to an NFT claims page.

Metaverse Opportunities

In late 2021, Nike acquired a blockchain startup RTFKT. The sportswear brand hopes to blur the lines between physical goods, NFTs, blockchain and games.

It had already created a custom metaverse called Nikeland using the Roblox platform, a virtual meeting place for sports fans and sneakerheads that offers various promotional events. You can buy goods from famous athletes and wear them in other Roblox games. About 7 million users visited Nike’s meta store in the first five months.

You may remain skeptical, but Web 3.0 has untapped potential for e-commerce apps. So watch closely as the technology matures. And if you’re already on the blockchain hype train, check out platforms like GigLabs that allow you to integrate NFTs into ecommerce apps.

Source: GigaLabs

Specialty stores

We all like Amazon. But trying to build an online shopping app like Amazon means diving into a market red with blood shed in the water by every competing shark. A blue ocean strategy, on the other hand, looks for less crowded markets.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Will you buy an expensive Pokemon card from a huge marketplace that sells all sorts of junk, or choose an app that focuses specifically on rare Pokemon cards? With niche competence, you not only avoid competition, but also gain customer trust.

Just ask Whatnot with its valuation of $3.7 billion. Or, as marketing guru Neil Patel put it, “If you try to be known for everything, you’ll get known for nothing.”

So do some market research before opening the business. Define your Unique Value Proposition (RRP):

• Who are your target customers?
• What goods would you like to sell?
• What makes you different from the competition?

One of our clients is a company that sources bespoke wedding dresses from European designers. They used MindK’s shopping app development services to make these products available to high-income brides from around the world.

Another client of ours turned scientific publishing into a profitable e-commerce business. So don’t be afraid to look for opportunities off the paved road.

Business Perspectives, an e-commerce platform for an academic publisher [Read the case study]

Conclusion

E-commerce is a booming industry, expected to reach over $27 trillion by 2027, but competition is also increasing, so it makes sense to keep an eye on the emerging trends keeping that can give you an edge over your competitors.

Now that you know how to create a shopping app for markets like the US or Europe, you might be wondering, “What is the next step?”

MindK has been developing custom software for 13 years. Our experts can help you choose the right mix of pre-built components and custom features to create an online store app that fits your unique needs. Just write to us and we’ll arrange a free consultation with our ecommerce developers.

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