How I created eCommerce Mobile App
Tags: ecommerce, mcommerce, flutter, dart
Published: 2022-05-23 06:36:18

In today’s world, mobile apps are no longer used solely by big brands. More and more small and mid-size businesses are following the mobile trend, understanding that an effective mobile strategy involves more than just a mobile-friendly website.

After closely evaluating this trend, I wanted to help both business owners and developers reduce their costs in addition to the thousands of hours spent on designing, developing, and testing a mobile app. With this mission I came up with E-Shop, a complete solution for optimizing the delivery of apps to the market with high productivity and cost-efficiency.

E-Shop is a universal e-commerce mobile app, fully integrated with WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Opencart, and Prestashop, running on both iOS and Android. It provides a great solution for everyone who is in need of a ready-to-use e-commerce mobile application.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/bi48h3lst2j7puhvjk32.png)

## Its key functionalities:

- Full e-commerce features – compatible with top e-commerce frameworks.
- Instance Synchronization – from mobile to the server and vice versa in real-time.
- Great UX design.
- Flexible Design System – easy to configure the homepage, category, and Blog with a bunch of built-in components.
- Multi-currencies, multi-languages, multi-payments.
- Discount – Coupon, Sale off with Countdown, Point, and Reward.
- Push Notification – via OneSignal, Firebase; Order Status Notifications, In-app notifications, history messages. 
- Social Login – easy to register or sign up (Apple, Facebook, Google, e-mail), SMS Login by Firebase Auth.
- Powerful User Setting – view WishList, Order Tracking, Rate App on app stores, Dark theme, Smart Chat setting, switching languages, enable push notification.
- Offline Images Caching – speed up the loading performance with caching image offline method.
- Google Analytics – easy to track the user online and the number of registrations via Firebase in real-time.

## How the app was developed. Technology stack:
First of all, let’s clarify that E-Shop is a template Whitelabel app that allows companies to create a private label app customized with custom colors and a custom main screen within 1 week.

Being inspired by the Flutter framework, made by Google, I developed the E-Shop app in Flutter and used WordPress Woocommerce as a server under the hood. It is continuously being integrated in platforms, such as Github, Circle CI, Docker, and AWS.

In the end, E-Shop turned out to be somewhat innovative in the sphere. I personally failed to identify any competitors who had as many streamlined customization opportunities. E-Shop's users could already create a custom-looking interface within several days.

## Step by step process:
Firstly, I identified the necessity of E-shop for the technological community by exploring everything that my potential competitors had to offer. Turns out they did not provide their users with the features I had in mind, so I correctly identified the trend. I then went on to develop a thorough setlist of features for E-Shop and, after coming up with its design, embarked on the actual development journey. It consisted of building the App's core, developing the base theme colors and fonts for customization, and connecting it to WordPress Woocommerce's groundbreaking content management system. After connecting the Stripe payment system library to the app and testing it, I released it.

## Results:
Multi Homepage Templates was created with 20 rebuild homepage layouts. A bunch of readily defined themes is included and easy to customize to make a personalised elegant theme by using E-Shop’s powerful widgets.

Diverse Products: digital/downloadable, affiliate products, dynamic product variants, different types of layout (colours, dropdown, box), products’ image options in the catalogue.

Various payment options are available: COD, Paypal, Razorpay, Mercado Pago, Direct Bank Transfer (BACS), webview payment: your local payments, checkout, and shipping are available.

All businesses with websites based on a framework: Opencart, Magento, WooCommerce – can be easily integrated with E-Shop in just a few steps, and quickly release the final app to both App Store and Google Play store.

Finally, the app provides businesses with a great UI/UX: multi-level categories (horizontal, menu, side menu, card view, etc.), quick product filter, super smooth checkout flow, keyword history search, blog detail screens - change to different fancy blog detail news via the config file.

## The app’s advantages:
To sum up, the app meets all business requirements including e-commerce functionalities, impressive UX design, and smooth performance on both iOS and Android devices. It is Android and iOS Native with high speeds and stability. Among its advantages, I can point out flexibility and compatibility. It is compatible with WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Opencart, and Prestashop. It is very easy to update the app settings, config, customize, and manage languages without having technical or programming skills.

The app has demonstrated commercial validation, demonstrated by the following results: 3,000+ clients, 9,900+ author sales, 2,300+ git commits, 3,000+ active licenses, 1,000 apps in stores.

As such, E-shop serves as an example of a correctly identified niche. Hopefully my experience here can aid in providing something greater of the sort for the industry.