With eCommerce Apps, Enable Your Customers to Generate Revenue by Selling Products Online

Written on 10/05/2023
Mike Halder

Today, we're going to focus on a category of apps that's really catching on at the moment: I'm talking about eCommerce apps.
While online retailing has been an established trend for several years now, this trend has been considerably reinforced by the Covid pandemic, which has affected the whole world. Small businesses have been quick to embrace digital technology as a way of staying in business. Indeed, having a mobile app is a good way of generating revenue by selling products online.

That's why, in this article, we present the main features of our eCommerce apps , so you can confidently prospect for businesses that want to go digital.

 

1/ What are the targets?

With Halder Group's eCommerce apps, you can target different types of customers. The categories of customers to prospect can be divided as follows:

 

  • Local delivery and in-store pickup

Groceries
It's not just the major retailers who can offer their customers an online ordering and delivery service. With Halder Group, even grocery stores and convenience stores can offer this service to their customers. With an app, users can order their favorite products directly from their mobile. Grocery stores can offer local delivery or click & collect.

Florists
An urgent need to please? A special occasion? With an app, florists can boost sales and simplify processes. Indeed, it's much more convenient for customers to place orders from a mobile app. Moreover, with our focus on design, your customer's app will be perfect, just like their store!

 

  • Food ordering
Restaurants
More and more restaurants are offering home delivery or click & collect to boost sales and delight their customers, even at home. Go and prospect restaurants in your area. What's more, you have a significant competitive advantage over other mainstream platforms: there's no commission on sales!

Fastfood
With Halder Group, even fast food restaurants can benefit from a low-cost mobile app to offer their customers a home delivery service. What's more, with an app, taking orders is much simpler: no need to take orders over the phone!
  • Delivery by carrier

 

Clothes
The clothing category is the leading eCommerce category. It is essential for small stores to go digital to remain competitive with the big brands. Customers will surely be excited to promote the stores in their city, close to home. There's a marketing strategy to build on!

Being present on the web and in stores is also an opportunity to expand internationally by delivering orders to other countries, with carrier delivery.

Alcohols and spirits
Whether you're a well-known wine merchant or a small liquor store, everyone has the right to a web presence. Particularly as this type of company often has customers all over the country. For those who live a long way from the store, there's nothing like an app for ordering your favorite wines for celebrations or special occasions. It will be delivered by courier according to the terms chosen by the customer.

Decoration
You can also prospect businesses specializing in interior and exterior decoration. Consumers increasingly like to shop online. This is also the case for this product category.

Sports accessories
At the moment, sport is really in fashion. More and more influencers are specializing in this field. Their content covers a wide range of sports: bodybuilding, martial arts, running and more. For both experienced athletes and those just starting out, you need the right equipment. Offer an app to small sports shops . They'll certainly increase their sales with a mobile app. What's more, they can also sell sports food.

Care and beauty products
Send your skincare & beauty boxes anywhere in the country and even internationally with Halder Group's eCommerce apps.

The advantage of our solution is that you can offer your customer a presence on three platforms: the web, with a Progressive Web App, the Google Play Store with the native Android version, and the App Store with the native iOS version. In this way, your customer will reach a wider audience than with a traditional eCommerce website.

 

2/ Features

  • Payment gateways

You can connect your app to several gateways to receive online payments. The payment gateways we offer are Stripe (for credit card payments and Apple Pay and Google Pay), PayPal and Mercado Pago (especially for the Latin American market). In addition, we also offer the "Offline Payment" extension, which enables users to pay outside the app, at the time of delivery or click and collect. The customer can then pay by the means of their choice (cash, credit card or other). Using Stripe also enables us to offer additional payment methods: iDEAL, Google Pay, Bancontact, etc.

 

  • Local delivery and time slots

The Local Delivery feature lets you define delivery zones in the store settings. Zones can be defined according to the zip codes for which you wish to offer delivery, or according to a radius of miles around the store .

Furthermore, you can set store opening and closing times and delivery slots to make the purchasing and delivery process easier for the customer.

 

  • Delivery by carrier

Delivery by carrier allows you to set delivery rates according to the weight or price of the order. The rate may be higher or lower, depending on the country and delivery time. However, don't forget that offering free delivery is a great way to encourage purchases. So don't hesitate to offer it!

 

  • Inventory management
When you add a product to your store, you can also enter the stock level. This will be debited automatically when the product is added to the cart by a user. If the order is canceled, the stock is automatically credited again.
 
  • Tax management

Prices can be displayed with or without VAT, and you can manually manage taxes on each product with the TaxJar system.

 

  • Order management status

With back-office access, your customers can easily manage their orders. We offer 4 different order statuses: pending, processed, delivered and cancelled. For each status, an automatic email and a push notification are sent to the end customer, enabling them to track the progress of their order.

For those who deliver by carrier, it is also possible to enter the tracking URL in the order summary, so that customers can follow the progress of their package even more precisely.

 

  • Product import/export

You can import products using the product import/export function. This is a great time-saver for stores that already have an existing catalog in Excel format. Simply modify the file to suit the requirements of the Halder Group system, convert it to .csv format and import. In just a few minutes, the store is ready!

 

  • Automation
With Zapier and Make extensions for eCommerce, you can connect your app to thousands of online services. These extensions are ideal for setting up automations without any knowledge of computer code. For example, you can create a workflow that automatically adds new customers' emails to the mailing list of a marketing campaign on Mailchimp.

And if you have the necessary development skills, you can also use our public APIs to connect an eCommerce app with external services. 

 

3/ Marketing tips to boost sales

  • Discount coupons

Your customer can create coupons to boost sales. The advantage is that he can target prospects (people registered in the app who haven't yet purchased) or customers (people who have already placed at least one order in the app). You can also define the duration of the discount. It's a great way to boost sales: welcome discount on the first order, Black Friday, Mother's Day, etc.

 

  • Push notifications

Push notifications are very useful for establishing contact with app users. They can be used to highlight a new product, notify users of a promotion or set up other marketing operations. The customer can define an action linked to the opening of the push, such as opening a specific product page, or opening a particular section of the app.

 

  • Free delivery
According to a study published on multichannelmerchant.com, 47% of eCommerce site owners say that free shipping enables them to increase their profits. That's how important it is to offer free delivery to app users. Today, it is estimated that one in two eCommerce sites offers free delivery. This is a marketing tip you can suggest to your customer. In fact, offering free delivery can increase the conversion rate by over 30%.
  • Managing a Blog in the app

One or more Blog sections can be added to the mobile app to improve SEO for the PWA version, but also to provide users with information about the store's history, brand philosophy, details of products sold, news about the store, etc. This can be very useful for creating a brand image and establishing a link with users, by associating the publication of new articles with the sending of push notifications.

 

  • Display out of stock products

On Halder Group, there's an option to display products that are out of stock. If enabled, this option helps to build anticipation around the product and ensure that the product is always visible to app users. If the option is not activated, out-of-stock products are not visible to end customers.

 

  • Cart reminder
Let's suppose a user adds one or more products to his shopping cart. He then leaves the app for an indefinite period. When they return, a popup appears, reminding them of the details of their cart and inviting them to complete their order. With this option, your customer won't lose any sales!
  • Abandoned order

The abandoned order reminder is based on the same principle as the shopping cart reminder: it's a popup that appears when the user hasn't completed the checkout process.

 

  • Renew an order
If a customer wants to renew an order they've already placed in the past, they can do so in just one click with the "renew order" option. All they have to do is go to their profile, then to their order history, and click on the "reorder" button. This is even more convenient for those who buy the same thing every month, as in the case of a local grocery store, for example.

 

4/ Give your customers access to their app's back office

As a Halder Group reseller, you can give your customer access to the app's back office , displaying your brand and logos instead of the Halder Group brand.

You can manage access to the various back-office menus. For example, in an eCommerce application, your customer will surely be interested in accessing the "Orders" menu as well as the "Marketing" menu to create coupons, for example. You can also activate the receipt of administrative notifications, which enables your customer to receive an automatic email each time an order is placed in the app. This is very practical for order management!

With access to the back-office, your customer can also manage his store's inventory and add new products if necessary. This means they're completely independent in the management of their online business!