How To Use Shopify To Build An ECommerce Mobile Application
The eCommerce industry sees the most significant increase in mobile solutions because it is driven by the need to satisfy customer requirements online sales accelerate. Consumers need the freedom, even on the go, to buy goods and services from anywhere. As a result, more online shoppers prefer mobile eCommerce to websites, offering advanced speed, ease of use, and adaptability.
These days, mobile trade is increasing exponentially. If you want to establish a successful company and concentrate on attracting and growing sales, it should be clear how important a mobile eCommerce solution is.
Why Use Shopify For Mobile ECommerce Applications
Shopify is the most prominent eCommerce website builder today, with +1,000,000 merchants like yourself using its service. Shopify itself is providing a website with all the necessary features of eCommerce. That website is also supported in mobile browsers.
But as you all know, mobile business effectiveness begins beyond a mobile website.
People expect their favorite brands to create mobile apps for their shops instead of shopping via mobile-friendly sites. The only reason is that it would make shopping on site more accessible to keep track of our future orders and discounts! Push notifications are a leading advantage in the mobile app as they are beneficial to notify people regarding new arrivals & discounts. This feature is a significant advantage in terms of sales of the brand.
Due to mobile apps’ many advantages, SHOPIFY also provides a way to convert stores to mobile apps. There are multiple mobile application builders on the SHOPIFY store to create mobile applications, but it’s more beneficial to make your mobile builder for your clients!
Steps To Convert Shopify Store Into The Mobile Application
Below are the simple steps to set up a SHOPIFY store & make the mobile application live on the store using the SHOPIFY store’s mobile build AppStore.
This application is for which converts SHOPIFY web stores to mobile applications. You can create your custom application & upload it on the SHOPIFY store. You can select the most appropriate & user-friendly application that allows you to enable products from the website with seamless integration of checkout with shipping & payment methods.
- Choose a SHOPIFY application
- Set up SHOPIFY account
- Add your Shopify store to the app
- Customize & design mobile application
- Deploy iOS & android applications on the app store & play store, respectively.
Multiple applications are available on the SHOPIFY, but if you create your own, it is more suitable to add functionalities according to your choice. But if you want to complete it within a less amount of time, you can go with a ready-made application from the store.
Now let’s see how we can create our mobile application using the SHOPIFY web store.
You have to perform the below procedures to create a practical & attractive eCommerce mobile application.
Setup Shopify Account And Web Store
You have to sign up for a Shopify account for the web store. After setting up your account, you have to add all the necessary details for eCommerce stores, i.e., menus, products, collections, etc.
Finalize The Features & Create The UI Design For The Mobile Application
The most important part of the application is requirement analysis. To make the application more popular, it must provide the best mobile experience to fulfill all customer’s needs.
Below Are The Critical Features Of Any Mobile ECommerce Application
- User-friendly & attractive UI to enable native iOS & android app experience
- Social Media Login
- Categories with products listing
- Sort & filter products
- Cart
- Wishlist
- Fully native & smooth checkout process
- Push notifications
- App analytics
- Dark mode support
How To Implement Shopify In Mobile Applications
As we all know, Shopify is providing the default Website & Admin Panel for eCommerce platforms. Still, if we are going to create a mobile application for the same Shopify website, it must get all the data like products, banners, offers, accounts, etc., in the application.
Shopify is providing GraphQL & also JSON APIs to get the data from the server. It also provides Mobile Buy SDK for native iOS & Android to get the data & perform other operations on it from mobile applications. You can check it from the below links:
Android: https://github.com/Shopify/mobile-buy-sdk-android
iOS: https://github.com/Shopify/mobile-buy-sdk-ios
Using the above SDK, you can call Shopify graph QL APIs for iOS & Android native mobile applications development to get products, details of products, payment, sign in, sign up, etc.
But one of the drawbacks of Shopify for the mobile application is that it is not providing APIs for some of the essential features of the mobile applications. You have to apply customized logic to deliver those features in the application.
List Of Features That Are Not Available In The Mobile Buy SDK Of Shopify
- Category wise products listing
- Cart
- Wishlist
- Filter
- Push Notifications
For Some Of The Functionalities, You Have To Use The REST API Of Shopify To Achieve Functionalities
- To get listing of countries to manage shipping address
- Get details of customers using the email address
- To contain the meta fields
Using GraphQL API, the availability of products can be maintained easily with the product’s attributes.
As described above, using different aspects, we can create efficient & user-friendly eCommerce applications using the Shopify server.
Wrapping Up !!
There are various benefits to turning the Shopify store into a mobile application to enhance your business & increase customer satisfaction. Shopify stores are easy to maintain because you need to customize multiple things to implement them for mobile apps. At Zealousweb, we have an experienced Mobile Application Development team to convert the Shopify store into an attractive & smooth mobile application.
You can contact us at any time if you need assistance with this module. We also provide ready-made products that convert Shopify stores into native mobile applications in the simplest way possible.
Stay tuned for our next article to know how to implement the above features using personalized logic !!
Shopify provides only Graph QL APIs for some of the functionalities that can not be achieved using REST APIs. So to add those functionalities, you have to use Graph QL APIs / Mobile buy SDK.
No APIs are available to get the list of sub-categories, but you can achieve this by implementing a customized solution.