Up until the last decade, there was no option available to purchase something online from the comfort of your house and get it delivered to your doorstep. The only option available in shopping was to wait in a queue at your local stores or malls. However, thanks to modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence, now you can shop online at your convenience with the help of shopping assistant apps and avoid those stressful queues. Many software development firms provide retail software development services that you can employ to build your very own shopping assistant app.
Online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay have shown tremendous growth in the past decade. People now prefer online shopping over traditional, in-store shopping simply because it’s way more convenient and streamlined.
But with growing product categories, the number of shopping assistants needs to increase to make shopping as convenient as possible. Furthermore, custom AI development is the need of the hour for retails businesses looking for employ customer data to improve their sales and revenue numbers.
While browsing for products online, people spend most of their time searching for the right product that suits their requirements. But a lot of times, this process is incredibly time-consuming simply because there are so many categories and finding the right product is like looking for a needle in a haystack. To tackle this problem, mobile app development firms shifted their focus to building shopping assistant app development that can help customers find the right products.
Whether you want a bag for your distinctive choice or any dress of your particular style, these intelligent apps assist you in finding the best prices, comparing various products to find the best for you. And if you want to build a shopping assistant app of your own or your store, then we have curated a list of all the key features you must add to make sure it is the best tool it can be. Allowing your customers to shop online will not only boost your sales but improve your online presence and open many avenues for marketing and sales.
Why Do You Need to Develop a Shopping Assistant App?
Developing a shopping assistant app development for your business is always a great idea, and there are many reasons behind that. These applications not only help you improve your sales and build better relationships with your customers but it also helps your customers make purchases faster and find the products they are actually looking for.
As per a Google survey, 88% of the shoppers use smartphones to shop online. So having an app is not only smart, it’s essential if businesses want to compete in the market.
These apps not only save people a lot of idle-browsing time while shopping, but also provide suggestions based on their purchase history. You can develop a custom shopping assistant app by partnering up with an eCommerce app development company that excels at building smart AIs
How Artificial Intelligence Takes Shopping to a Whole New Level
In the eCommerce industry, every brand is employing AI for various purposes, including building smart AI-based shopping assistant apps to help their customers shop easy and fast. Due to the overload of choices available on online shopping platforms, customers often find themselves confused and end up simply browsing for some time and not make a sale in the end. This problem gets exponentially bigger as the inventory and choices available increase. That’s where AI comes into the picture. AI can help businesses make more sales by gently guiding users to the products they are interested in. Based on customer preferences, browsing and purchase history data, etc., these AI-based shopping assistant are helping customers and businesses accelerate the shopping process. Some of the key benefits of AI-based shopping assistant apps are:
- Customers benefit a lot from the visual searches designed with the help of AI. These visual searches assist the user in narrowing down the preferred choices in a matter of seconds. Many apps, such as Pinterest lens, use machine vision to identify a product on the internet and curate a list of related or similar products. Google lens is another tool that uses the user’s phone camera to capture the image of a product and generate a list of similar products from numerous websites and redirects the user towards their perfect fit.
- The eCommerce industry is widely benefitting from Artificial Intelligence and its large pool of capabilities. With the combination of human touch and AI, you can generate high revenue. Some applications are not limited to only suggestions solely based on AI; they have added some human touches; apart from the customer’s previous shopping history, these apps offer their customers customized filters based on their patterns to help them find their desired product quickly.
- Along with shopping, AI has now become your stylist when it comes to fashion. This process is called AI-generated feed. These applications learn the behaviour of the customers on the app and their likes. Then it processes the data in real-time and analyzes the current fashion trends and suggests popular and trendy dresses based on its calculations and the likes of the users.
- Apart from learning the customer’s behaviour AI is helping the retailers sell their product online. Everyone uses social media and shares almost every detail of their life on these platforms, like what they purchased and what they like. There are various sponsored posts related to a particular product online. AI identifies the pinned sponsored product’s posts and suggests these products to the users based on their behaviour on social media platforms. In simple terms, it helps retailers to match their products with the right customers.
- AI helps in identifying the trending products with AI bots. These AI bots crawl through various platforms online and study the latest trends about various products. This helps the retailers to always display the latest trending products on their shopping assistant app or websites. With the help of machine learning, it recognizes various images and curates a data list related to the trending products in real-time.
Understand The Mechanism of These Shopping Assistant Apps
Any shopping assistant app development is based mainly on artificial intelligence or a combination of AI and human analysis. These apps are divided into two classes: Human-based and AI-based.
As the name indicates, first class is based on human insights in addition to data intelligence. A real-life person is merged behind the interface that does the work of sorting your particulars to find a perfect product.
The second type is AI-based shopping assistant apps. Major work of Artificial Intelligence includes driving these applications for data analysis, and specially designed algorithms create suggestions based on user behavior. These suggestions generally don’t need any human consultation or approval, ultimately simplifying a user’s shopping spree.
AI downloads data from numerous online catalogs and websites and processes a big database to search for the right product to fit the User’s requirement at lightning speed.
The crucial factor of the shopping assistant app development process is various machine learning algorithms that search Uuser’s data to study their habits and individual preferences. This collected data is then used to personalize the offers and list of specifically tailored products for him/her.
Must-have Features for a Shopping Assistant App
The popularity of these apps heavily depends on the number of features they have to offer. Based on your unique business needs and your customer preferences, there are countless features you can add durng your custom eCommerce app development.
However, there are certain must-have features for every shopping assistant app.
1. Price Comparison
Price comparison is a mandatory feature for such apps. This feature helps the users find the right product with the best price and saves some money on that deal. These price comparisons are based on the users’ previous shopping experience and needs.
This feature can fetch data with the help of Artificial Intelligence from digital stores or retail stores that are willing to deliver the data with additional discounts. You can partner with brands to get the data or use open-source data.
2. History of Purchase
Purchase history allows users to access their past purchase, previous and current price, and the coupons or discount available on those products. In some apps, this feature assists in repeating a previous purchase or plan for a new one.
3. Coupons
Coupons are the need of the hour in terms of shopping assistant app development. These coupons help users in getting a discount on a particular product or store. Users can know the final discounted price for a product just by applying the available coupon.
4. Shipment Tracking
After purchasing a product, users want to know their product’s location at a given instance of time. Every retail application should display the order’s status for the convenience of the users. Updating a user about their product can be done by displaying the information on the shipment tracking page or using SMS and push notifications as the product makes its way through various checkpoints. There must also be an option for the user to opt-out from these updates on your app.
5. Amount Prediction
Price prediction done with the help of AI conveys updates to the User about a product’s price fluctuations. This feature runs on a price prediction algorithm that will work towards your shopping assistant app’s advantage. This feature notifies the users about the price of their favorite products every time there is a change.
6. Custom Recommendations
Custom recommendations are based on machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. These recommendations will be about various other products that will be relevant to the purchased product. For example, if a user purchases a shirt, this feature will recommend the perfect sneakers or jeans that will match the purchased shirt.
The personal recommendation feature will learn more about you every time you use the app and deliver accurate recommendations. Brands are a fan of this feature as they offer more products tailored to the User’s preferences.
Building A Shopping Assistant App Is Easy.
An AI-based shopping assistant app can make a lot of difference for your retail store. In fact, many retailers these days are investing heavily in such AI solutions for retail. If you want to build one for your business, then you need to hire an eCommerce app development company like Matellio. Sure, you can build your app on your own, but in-house development is very expensive and challenging, with many complications ranging from hiring talent to sustaining software development infrastructure. Therefore, looking for retail software development services from an experienced company is your best bet if you are a newcomer or a small-medium business owner.
To build an AI-based shopping assistant app, you must first be clear about your requirements, budget, and how you will gauge the app’s performance. Based on these details, you can start building an app plan and hire an software development firm that can help you improve that plan and reach its maturity. Once the planning phase is done, the app development and design process can begin. If you have partnered up with the right company, then you will be put at the center of every decision that is made during the development process. But keep an open mind and listen to any suggestions your developer might have. Once the app is developed, rigorously tested, and deployed, you need post-launch support and further updates. Most software developers provide post-launch serivces at reasonable prices.
Conclusion
Shopping assistant apps can revolutionize how your retail stores operates. These apps bring your store closer to your customers and eliminate all the tediousness associated with in-store shopping. Furthermore, they help you improve your conversion rates by providing suggestions to your customers and accelerating the buying process.
If you want to develop an AI-based shopping assistant app, then Matellio is the right partner for you. We are an mobile app development company with years of experience helping retailers build their dream shopping apps. Our highly-skilled developers and engineers excel at providing top-notch services in a time-efficient manner.
At Matellio, your vision matters. We are simply here to make it a reality. That is why, we follow the Agile software development model that helps us keep our clients at the heart of your development process.If you want to learn more about our retail software development services, please contact us!
