How is Web Scraping beneficial for Ecommerce Companies?

Web Scraping and its benefits for eCommerce Companies | Making the eCommerce Development the Best

Web scraping is the process of accumulating and organizing data from a variety of sources. Majority of the times, there is no facility to extract this data and you would have to consult a professional web scraping company in order to execute it. In the age of the internet today, data scraping can give you a competitive advantage over others. Business data is a gold mine and accumulating and organizing it can benefit your eCommerce store in a number of ways.

Some of the ways how web scraping and the data collected by it can benefit your eCommerce store are as follows:

1. Scraping Product Data from Merchants 

If an eCommerce store sells a variety of products from a number of different merchants, manually entering each product in your database is not a viable option. It requires a lot of manpower, time and hence a significantly large investment. Scraping all this data using a simple web scraping tool can help you save it all. The whole process becomes more seamless and even eliminates the possibility of human error. To implement this, you could either consult a web scraping company or better yet, an eCommerce development company as this would be more of their specialty.

2. Scraping Competitor Pricing 

As an eCommerce store, there are quite a few techniques that can help you show yourself better than the others to your prospects. The most effective way, however, is showing how you provide your customers with a better priced product. A web scraping tool will simply collect the pricing data  from various competitors and display them on your website. You can even choose from which sites you need the data to be collected.

3. Scraping Customer Review Data 

Customer feedback and review is crucial for any business. Its important for any business to know what their users are saying about them to others. Web scraping can help eCommerce store owners to collect this data from numerous sources to analyze their presence on these channels.You can then respond and bring about changes accordingly.

4. Scraping websites to generate new leads

Scraping is used to collect data and one of the types of data you can collect is customer information. You can target a website or channel where you could find your target audience. Then with the help of a professional web scraping company, you could extract customer information to further target them with promotional offers.

Apart from the ones given above, there are a lot more benefits of web scraping for not just eCommerce businesses but all the others too. The list would be long and even different for each industry. However, this gives a pretty clear picture of the benefits of web scraping.   

Top User Experience Enhancing Features of Android Oreo | Mobile App Development

Top 5 features of Android Oreo that will promote Mobile App Development with Better User Experience

When working on a mobile app, the first thing that professional Mobile App Development companies will suggest you is to map out everything you'll be offering in terms of user experience. This is because how your users feel about you is key to your success.

Similarly, in terms of experience, Android Oreo aims to remove the biscuit layer and go straight for the cream. So far, with the new features that have been announced, it seems like Google might just succeed in achieving it. Although it isn't available yet for all android phones, it will be by next year. However, there's no reason why we can't still be incredibly excited about it.

Here are 5 New features of Android Oreo to be excited about:

1. Notification Badges

Notifications badges are badges that appear over an app's icon indicating the number of unread notifications. In Android Oreo, users will be able to turn these notification badges on or off according to their convenience. Long pressing these app icons will display the notification as a small interactive push notification pop up. Users can take relevant action on this small pop up itself. 

2. Notification Priorities

Badges are not the only exciting functionalities in terms of app notifications. Android Oreo also lets users manage the notifications from different apps in a little more detail. Users can mark their preferences of how they want their notifications to be shown for a particular app. For instance, you can set to receive only silent alerts for certain group chats of a messaging app while the others notify you by a sound and lighting up your screen. However, this depends on whether your app supports this functionality or not. So make sure to include this option before you hire Android App Developers to execute your project. 

3. Picture in Picture Feature

In simple words, this feature will allow you to continue viewing a video while you access other apps. The video player will just be scaled down allowing you to have access to all the other things on your phone. For instance, you're in a video call with someone and wish to take down some notes of what they're saying. The video will simply scale down while you open up your notepad and type everything you need. Again this feature too will have to be enabled by your Android App Developers for your app.

4. Better Auto-fill Data Sync

Android Oreo can proudly boast its capability to save all your login, payment, app data etc. with your permission. This data will then be stored between devices and across apps for you to easily use. Plus, Google claims that the feature is much faster this time so the most relevant auto-fill data will be detected way earlier than it does now.

5. Exciting New Emojis

Taking things to a lighter side, Android Oreo will also introduce a whole list of new and exciting emojis. Some of these include a wizard, dinosaur, fairy and an exploding head you can use when you hear something mind-blowing. Google has made sure to add more face emojis to help users express themselves a lot better in chats.

Android Oreo seems like an incredibly promising upgrade, like always, and has definitely gotten users and android app developers excited. How do you feel?

5 Best Shopify Apps ecommerce Startups Must Have!

Part 2 - Apps for enhancing User Experience 

Previously it was briefly covered why Shopify is one of the best eCommerce platforms and how it has a plethora of apps to add more value to your store. The 5 apps we spoke about in the previous article were primarily beneficial for your stores sales and marketing strategies. Apart from innovative sales techniques, another aspect of your customer journey from first contact to conversion that is very crucial is User Experience.

The reason why User Experience is of utmost importance is because it is the first step of the customer's journey. The facts state it in a very simple way, if the prospect doesn't enjoy their experience in your store, it is highly unlikely they will buy from you.

Luckily, Shopify has a number of different apps to enhance your user experience. Here is a list of the top 5 Shopify apps that are recommended by professional eCommerce developers:

1. Persistent Cart:

The persistent cart is rather a crucial addition to your eCommerce store. The function of this is that it saves the shopping cart of a user in the same state that it was in when left earlier. Often users shop on multiple devices and also during different times which might empty their cart when they close their tabs. This puts the users in a difficult situation and hence ultimately abandoning the website.

With persistent cart, once added in the cart, the items stay there until they are removed by the user themselves. When the user logs out, the cart is emptied. However, this feature can be turned off if required allowing the cart to empty out only when the user wants so.

2. Tidio Live Chat:

When shopping in a physical store, there is always a salesperson along to clear any doubts you have about any product. This is equally important when shopping online and this is what Tidio Live Chat offers.

With a live chat option, your potential customers can get in touch with you at any point of time. When you're online, you will get an alert whenever a query is raised and you can immediately chat with the user. When offline, a contact form will still be available for them to send in their queries. It is also mobile friendly and provides multi language support.

3. SocialShopWave:

Social Media is an important tool for both the users and businesses. Social media not only makes it easier for them to access your site but also lets them become a part of your online community which imbibes a sense of trust in them about your brand.

SocialShopWave allows you to enhance your user experience through social media remarkably. It allows your users to sign up for your websites using any social media platform they are comfortable with, lets them easily share your products on their pages and even send automated emails personalized based on what they bought or added to their wish list.

4. Yotpo:

When shopping online, the whole process is based on trust and hence it’s important for users to be able to establish that over your store. Yotpo helps you establish that trust through user reviews.

Yotpo allows users to give and see authentic product reviews from other customers and easily distribute those reviews on different social media platforms. As per researches by top eCommerce Development Companies, these not only help in establishing trust but also aid a lot in SEO through user content.

5. McAfee Secure:

Another aspect of trust that users need before being completely confident of purchasing from your store is how secure your site is. Especially in recent times with growing malware attacks, users need to be sure that sharing data and transactions can be carried out safely.

McAfee Secure is a pretty huge name in the market that people and eCommerce developers are aware of and trust. With a McAfee Secure Trustmark, users are ensured that your site has taken necessary precautions for securing the website and that they can confidently shop on it.

Conclusion

So that was the list of our top 5 Shopify apps that can enhance your store's user experience quite significantly. As mentioned earlier, user experience is the first step of a user's journey towards becoming a customer and your prime aim should be to make a digital experience delightful. These apps can definitely aid you in that process.

5 Best Shopify Apps Ecommerce Startups Must Have!

 Apps for Sales and Marketing Strategies

Shopify is one of the best eCommerce platforms that many eCommerce development companies recommend. It’s affordable and easy to use and is much more than an average storefront. Shopify features fully-secure checkouts that allow retailers to start taking payments instantly, while Shopify Shipping takes away the excessive work required for order fulfillment by managing the whole process for you. Shopify can even handle your marketing by automating emails and creating targeted social campaigns.

Shopify primarily aims at making it as simple as possible to start and grow an e-commerce business. By far it has been doing a really good job. It’s great for those looking to create an online store or move an existing store to a more user-friendly and comprehensive platform.

While the basic version of Shopify includes everything you need to get a store up and running, you can equip your store with a number of its apps that are available to get even more out of it.

Given below are 5 Amazing Shopify apps to help you boost sales and increase customer satisfaction.

1. Custom Audience Sync with Facebook:

This Shopify app by Audience Push is an essential app for all Shopify store owners who utilize Facebook advertising. After connecting your store to your Facebook, this app will automatically update your Facebook Custom Audience list with details of each new customer to your store.

Every time there is a phone number or email entered into the checkout, a sale or a customer registration, the contact details are instantly pushed to a Custom Audience list created on Facebook. This helps you focus on a more targeted group of users to boost your sales. Given the fact that almost everyone in the world now uses Facebook, this is an app your eCommerce developers shouldn't skip.

2. Exit Offers

The Exit Offers app is highly recommended by eCommerce Development companies help boost sales by helping you save customers that are about to abandon a purchase. Visitors who add items to their cart but then try to leave without completing their purchase are shown an offer designed to entice them to buy the product. The offer can be defined by the admin.

Another great feature of this is that you can split test offers right from within the app to help you figure out which type of offer performs the best for you. This app can easily help you increase your sales by 20% by targeting price sensitive customers. It also significantly decreases your cart abandonment rates which are a serious concern.  

3. Product Upsell

The product upsell app is actually a pretty impressive one that can have a direct impact on increasing sales. What it does is that based on the products in a user's shopping cart, it automatically recommends them related products that best go with it or sometimes are even important for it at the point of checkout.

For example, if a user buys a Laptop, this app will give a suggestion of buying a laptop case along, in case of a camera, it would suggest a memory card and so on. Users often don’t realize their requirement of another product that is often used with the one they wish to purchase unless reminded or suggested about. Hence, it might be rather essential to have your store equipped with this feature.

4. Quantity Breaks:

The quantity breaks app will allow you to create different pricing tiers based on the quantity of a product a user buys. It also has the flexibility of creating these different pricing tiers on products that fall in a particular group.

For instance, if a customer plans to buy a product in bulk, then you can set it up in a way to offer the customer a 10% discount on the purchase of 10 of the same products, a 15% discount on the purchase of 15 and so on. Setting it up for products within a specific group works similarly. This app could be immensely beneficial especially for those stores who mostly have orders placed in bulk.

5. Points, VIP, Referral Programs

No shopper would ever deny extra points or would skip a reward. BigCommerce reports that discount offers influence the decision to purchase for nearly 71 percent of shoppers. Hence, you should definitely consider providing offers and deals to your customers and this Shopify App by Sweet tooth does exactly that.

Sweet Tooth Loyalty Points app lets you reward your customers in over ten different ways. You can create a reward program to give shoppers incentives for making a purchase, referring a friend, creating an account, following you on social media, and a lot more. This could help you give a really good leverage over your competitors.

Although there are plenty of apps available to integrate with the Shopify platform, these are a few of the major ones that eCommerce developers especially recommend to boost your sales. Especially if you are just starting out, these can help you achieve your eCommerce dream. These apps can take a tremendous load off of you by automating a majority of your sales and marketing strategies and aid you in growing your business.

Trends that will change the Landscape of Mobile Apps

The mobile app market is not the same as it was before. With the insatiable demand and rise in competition, mobile app development companies are constantly introducing new changes and strategies in order to help businesses keep up with the competition.

Given below are 5 Mobile App trends that will change the mobile app market in the near future.

1. Interactive Push notifications

Push notifications became a crucial feature in 2017 for browsers. Although introduced a little earlier, it was only in the late 2016 that they caught a lot of heat. With them came along Interactive push notifications for mobile. In simple words, these notifications allow you to take an action or respond to the notification to without exiting your current application.

Interactive push notifications got a lot of positive feedback as it took the customer first approach by not forcing a notification on them but rather giving them a better option while their busy. In coming years, you will definitely see a lot of these popping up on your screens.

2. Wearable Apps

Wearable Apps introduced a new app ecosystem. Although these too have been around for quite some time, it is only now that the industry is seeing an exponential boom. With the rise in the functionalities they can provide and their reduced costs, wearable devices have become widely popular all around the world. And along with them, the wearable apps that power these devices too.

The functionalities of wearable devices are increasing and with them the functionalities of their related apps. However, along with these, other apps too will be compelled to make wearable device versions of themselves as wearable devices increase their reach. Major apps like Uber or Google Search already do.

3. Augmented Reality Apps

With the introduction of Pokemon Go, augmented reality was brought into a new light. New possibilities of AR opened up and AR App Developers became high valued resources. And now, AR apps are being introduced in the mobile apps of almost every industry there is. Real estate, eCommerce, Gaming, Automobile, Furniture etc. 

It wouldn't be very long before almost every industry would have a mobile app that implements the Augmented Reality Technology in one way or the other. Audi has already built complete showrooms around this technology awing customers worldwide. Mobile apps won't be very far.

4. Enterprise Apps

With the growth in the trend of Bring Your Own Device to Work, enterprise apps are destined to have a very large growth rate ahead. Since majority of businesses today rely on some sort of collaboration and office management software, there seems to be no other cost effective solution other than enterprise apps.

Enterprise apps are an extremely safe bet for businesses. they save up on device costs, device maintenance costs and since most of them will be developed as hybrid apps to cover the varied range of devices, they would also save a lot on development costs.

5. No More Hamburger Menus

There was a time when hamburger menus were an easy way out for mobile apps from a relatively huge and complex menu. However, 2017 might just mark its end. with the ever increasing demand of having more option in visible sights, app owners have no other choice rather than to use other alternatives for their menu.

Hamburger menus sure made the job easy, but that is not something mobile apps should aim for. Mobile apps should aim to deliver a better user experience to their customers in every possible way. And that's not always easy. Popular trends that might take over the hamburgers include in-line scrolling navigation, side scrolling navigation (something which is very popular with apps), bottom navigation and tabs.

Hamburgers Kill: How Hamburger Menus might be killing your UX?

Be it a mobile app or a website, being the first point of contact between your business and a potential customer, your top priority is to make their experience as smooth and friendly as possible. How to make the customer journey more delightful is one of the most important questions to ask before anything else.

When you hire a web developer or mobile app development company, the first thing that comes to mind is "Design". The design of your app or website is what ensures a good user experience. A well designed app or website is something that is visually appealing and also aligned with the theme of your business. It should also provide an enriched navigation and aim to guide the customer to what they are looking for in a minimum number of clicks or taps.

One such important aspect of design is navigational menus and over the past few years, the theme of Hamburger menus have emerged as a top choice of navigation. So let's take a look at what Hamburger menus are?

What are Hamburger Menus?

If you have a little idea about design, you might already know what Hamburger menus are. For those of you who don't, Hamburger is a frequently-used design trick for adding or rather hiding extra functionality somewhere off your main screens.

More technically speaking, the hamburger menu is a button placed typically in a top corner of a mobile app or website screen. It takes the form of an icon that consists of three parallel horizontal lines, suggestive of a list. Tapping or clicking this button results in a menu being revealed by either sliding out or popping up thereby displaying a list of options or features for the users to select or use.

Hamburger menus are a much debated topic. While some argue it is a great way of saving up precious screen space, it also termed as something that might be seriously affecting or even reducing time spent by users in the app or website. Although hamburger menus offer a lot of advantages, many studies have proven otherwise.

We will be taking a look at some of the negatives of hamburger menus here and also some great alternatives of it.

Disadvantages of Hamburger Menus:

Some of the most major cons of these menus that might require some serious attention are as follows:

1. Poor Discoverability: Hiding the menu behind a small button means it’s less likely to be found and can be the cause of frustration. Majority of the people prefer links that are more visible and hence information is easy to look for. Hiding vital information and links under a small button can significantly decrease your click through rates.

2. Added User Time: A hamburger requires an action or additional click before a user can use it. This involves added time and effort that a user might not be committed to, especially if it’s just one of many sites they’re visiting in a session. The fewer clicks you make to a piece of functionality, usually the more usable and intuitive. This theory has also been tested, which indicated that hamburgers were likely to be clicked 20 percent less than a traditional open navigation tab.

3. Poor Usability: The positioning of hamburgers is usually in the top corner left or right hand area. On mobile screens especially, these are the spots farthest from user's fingers which force them to make an extra effort to select them. This leads to poor usability and hence lower preference of the website or app.

4. Poor User Journey: This disadvantage is primarily based around multi-push menus, a type of hamburger menus. These menus are built of multiple steps or levels, allowing a user to click down through the site structure from within the navigation. These menus can usually encourage users to skip sections of a user journey through the site or app and probably mislead them to sections they were not interested to visit. This leads to a poor user journey and hence increased abandonment rates.

Great Alternatives to Hamburger Menus

Although the hamburger menus might seem like a great choice at first, it definitely isn’t. They are a good option to go with for very specific use cases though. However, if not, there are some other good alternatives to that as mentioned below;

1. Tabs:

Tabs help organize content in categories, like you would under a navigational drawer. People will instantly know how to use it. The best way to put it is by using labels with icons.

2. Bottom navigation

This is a great option for mobile screens. But websites too can use it creatively. This menu is mostly “always visible” and composed of icons with labels at the bottom of the screen. The navigation bar could be hidden/revealed on downward and upward scrolling or even stay fixed.

3. Side Scrolling navigation

This is an approach for longer lists. Make it scroll-able so that users can move it from side-to-side and view the menus. This is mostly recommended for mobile screens though. Icons with labels can be used to explain the side menus. However, it would be better off to test this option first for your audience before committing to it. Websites can get creative and use side slide out menus instead.

4. Inline Scrolling Navigation

This is best suited for website and not a lot for mobile apps though. You can lay out top categories in the home page. All these categories can then be laid out as a list with distinctive headers. These categories can be represented as horizontally scroll-able cards.

These are definitely just a few of the many innovative ways one can deliver a better user experience. 

Being a little innovative, web developers or mobile app development companies could also create a hybrid to provide you with an even more amazing solution. What this means is that there is no end to the way you can display yourself digitally, just make sure you weigh in your options accurately before making any decisions. 

What is Google’s Firebase | Mobile App Development services | Best Mobile Backend as a Service

  

Firebase is Google’s mobile and web development platform for quick development and testing of high quality apps. It Supports a load of functions that are complimentary and can be picked by the iOS app developer or Android app Developer that best suites the needs of the application. Firebase is basically a real time database. The data in the Firebase  can be seen as JSON files and allows real time changes to occur on the connected client side. Firebase mainly supports iOS, Android, Unity, Web and C++. You can use its required APIs and integrate with your APP and can experience its services but for the integration you either need to have the app development skills or you will have to hire mobile App developer for Firebase API development.

Below is the list of services provided by the Firebase:

1. Real-time Database: In these service the Firebase provides the Rest and bindings for several JavaScript frameworks APIs. The APIs permits the application data to synchronize over the client's data and gets collected in the cloud of the Firebase.

2. Cloud Messaging: It is known as Google Cloud Messaging basically used for the messaging and notification purposes and is currently being used for free of cost.

3. Authentication: This service of the Firebase provides a simple and secure way of managing the users. It has the multiple ways to authenticate like email, or any third party providers like Google, Facebook or using the direct method.

4. Firebase Storage: It provide the secure cloud based storage facility to store and share the pictures, Audios, Videos and any other documents it is backed by the Google Cloud Storage.

5. Hosting: Firebase provide both static and dynamic web hosting services which are specially made for the modern web applications. When the Web Assets are uploaded it automatically push them out of CDN and provides them the free SSL certificate with secure, reliable and low-Latency.

6. Testing Lab for Android: This service is for the Android app developers for automatic and custom testing on the both virtual and the physical devices by the Google.They discover the bugs and prepare the test report that includes the logs, screenshots and the videos.

7. Dynamic Links: These are the smart URLs to provide the customize user experience for the iOS, Android and Web apps as they dynamically change their behaviour.

8. APP Indexing: When the users try to search anything related to that app they could directly launch it from the search results called as Google search integration. Hence this helps in the reengagement of the users to the app.

9. Invites: This allows the user to share the invitation address addition to their referral codes or contents using the email, SMS or any third party tools like facebook or whatsapp. This solution works with Google Analytics so that it can be checked that the user installed the app via your invitation.

10. Remote Configuration:  This service provide Mobile app developer to change the behavior and the appearance of the app and the changes are made default in all the users app without any update from the app store.

11. Admob and Adword: Admob and Adwords are Google product that integrates with Firebase and enable developers to Earn money by displaying engaging ads to a global audience.