Hi, we are AppUnite, we take care of the businesses from a tech perspective. We build products and teams around them enabling our clients to bring the difference to the world.

We believe in knowledge sharing and software as a tool to improve companies and peoples’ lives. We take lessons from our daily challenges and share that experience and knowledge to help you build better products. 

Let’s talk about products, businesses, and software development!

Are you free from scrolling habits? Don't worry, if that is not the case, we're all in this together. No matter how hard we try to be conscious consumers and digital users with controlled online behaviors, we seem to fall short and should rather start singing our own Whitesnakes cover - *Guilty of Scroll…in the first degree*. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur - you win! We, your potential customers, have your attention. 

## Mobile e-commerce apps are the new black

Digital marketing offers so many options of promotion, such as targeted content in blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, eNewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, email marketing and marketing automations to attract customers. Being the owner of an e-commerce platform you need to validate how you want to attract your potential customers. 

Do you imagine your customers leaving their daily tasks to sit in front of their devices to visit your web e-commerce shop? A lot is dependent on your client’s type. A lot of new groups of users show that customer’s behavior has evolved and now includes many mobile users.

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This is not a surprising statement, nor are the percentages presented above. Statistics of mobile usage have an annual growth tendency. However, another change that we are just grasping, is the particular speed, execution and concentration on the result of actions performed on a mobile device, especially when it comes to the Gen Z users. 

Therefore, as Han Solo says in Star Wars: “*Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side, kid*." - time to think of investing in an e-commerce mobile app to be properly equipped to face the online market.

## Handy command center - our own phones!

As I have mentioned, we are all scrolling through something on our phones. We’re either looking for a new pair of shoes, planning holidays, managing our finances or choosing the equipment to take up a new hobby (check [here](https://appunite.com/portfolio/fishbrain) to find out what kind of e-commerce mobile app one of our partners offered to the fishermen’s community). 

Let’s look into why users exit a particular website on their phone and do not return.

Factors that have influence on that are: slow launching,  too many steps to finalize a purchase, annoying pop ups that block you from going further  on a purchase path. So, although your developer was assuring you that your e-commerce designs are mobile responsive, you might be losing a big slice of the pie and here comes the reasons why you need an e-commerce mobile app. 

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## Shopping while walking

Your users are getting very busy and multitasking. They love when their time is spent in an effective manner. With the usual lack of time, moments spent in transportation or on waiting for always “only 15 minutes late” friend or on short breaks at your 8 hours work, need to be efficient. In many cases, these moments could be used to get on track with “to shop list”. For me, personally, the words that have the best connotation and show the nature of e-commerce mobile apps are “efficient” and “meantime”. 
It ought to be *efficient* enough to perform buying activity in the *meantime*.

You are right to think that this article is to promote AppUnite  to build  your e-commerce mobile app. Although we love the applications that we create and we are great at mobile development, we  primarily specialize in addressing business needs. At Appunite we would like our business partners to know what they can ask for and [welcome communication](https://appunite.com/briefs). 

## Reasons for investing in mobile shopping app

**Mobile applications themselves can act as your converting ally**

Majority of people carry their phones most of the time during their day. By connecting to the built-in mobile tools like camera, microphone or geolocator, you can gain new ways and time of possible data introduction and marketing.
- A camera helps users to display purchased objects and share on social media, providing you community recommendations. It can serve as well for broader interaction with live video shopping practices that are coming from Asia to Europe and the USA.
- A microphone can be used for voice searches or even a new method: voice shopping that is already offered by Amazon Echo or simply their shopping app for iOS or Android, all connecting to Alexa. 
- Geolocation connectors are great facilitators to speed up the entry of delivery details, a stage in which  a consumer very often resigns from purchasing, if the process is inconvenient. 

**Amazon experience - most users have this comparison experience**

Difficult topic of coexistence of business in the shadow of a giant. Thanks to finding the right company to build an e-commerce mobile app for you, you give yourself chances to stand up to the challenge of keeping up with user experience satisfaction. 

**Building retention strategies**

One of your strategic moves can be to  formulate special offers that are available only via mobile in order to increase Average Order Value. Thanks to being in very close  proximity, just a reach of your hand away, through an e-commerce mobile app you can provide loyalty programs or special offers. Your customers will love it, if just by one click on their phone they could contact you customer service. 

**Push notifications**

Thanks to push notifications that will be appearing on a phone, it is more likely for a user to come back to the abandoned cart or the wish list that was created during their free time or once somebody makes a recommendation. Mobile notifications can be more engaging in contrast to email cart abandonment reminders that often get confused with spam emails.
They also permit your audience to keep track of sales and items back in stock.

**Time saving**

You can use various tools for integrated payments that speed up the buying process. The app on your phone will prevent long loading of the goods list, which for most young users on online stores, plays a major factor behind staying or leaving the shop. 

## Summary

All in all, the reasons for why you need an e-commerce app for your online store are numerous. Your users want to have everything in one place, but with a mobile app, you too can have all your business requirements for a great conversion rate covered in one place. Your customers/ users carry their phones with them on a daily basis - a portable device to cross the virtual door of your store with just one click. This may convert them to a customer that visits you out of habit and convenience, just as in good, forgotten days, they used to come to a friendly local shop owner. 

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Few advantages coming from having an e-commerce mobile app in comparison to online shop, web solutions.

Why you need to hurry up with getting a mobile app for your e-commerce business

Usually, we think about the code and artefacts connected with it (like documentation, releases, pipelines) as an individual entity. A subtle connection between code and people isn’t apparent at the first glance and can be easily overlooked. Meanwhile, we should perceive those two things which constitute a digital product as a single bio-technological organism. Why is it valuable to think in that way? Why don’t we deliberate about such subtleties when we look at material products like a rake or a mug?

That’s due to one crucial attribute of software products - the ability to be shaped in another way. This adaptability opens a wide array of new possibilities and often it is a decisive point in winning or losing a market. We usually take it for granted that code can be reprogrammed, but actually keeping that perspective available is an ongoing endeavour and definitely, it’s not free. We can be perfectly ok with a rake which can’t adapt to the seasons, but having a digital product which has a fixed-forever set of features is unacceptable these days. This issue is often encountered in the post-MVP phase (you can read about it [here](https://appunite.com/blog/scaling-a-startup-post-mvp-challanges-we-have-launched-an-mvp-and-now-what)) and next to [technical debt](https://appunite.com/blog/what-is-technical-debt-and-how-to-manage-it) is a common challenge that needs to be faced. 
 
### What actually coding is

So what’s the connection between that adaptability and the human perspective? At the end of the day, a product is modified by people. Visual changes in the code or the design, are only materialized artefacts of internalized models. In order to change something, one needs to “decode” a model from code, internalize it, understand it, and then think about how it can be tweaked to support new requirements, and finally “encode” it back.

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Nevertheless, humans are not computers. We have some limits within which we operate. Those limits are often described as **cognitive load**. And we can apply that term to the size of models with which we can operate efficiently, but also in terms of the number of personal relationships which we can keep healthy.

That leads us to the term called **Dunbar’s number**. It indicates how many relationships one can preserve. That number varies depending on the proximity of those relationships, but the most interesting for us is the number 15, which constitutes the *Circle of deep trust*. Why is it so important? Because it indicates to us the optimal size of a typical product team - which is usually around 8-10 people. The team states a peer-to-peer network, adding more and more “nodes” to it, makes things really hard.

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That’s why it is really crucial to pay attention to the signs of that communication overload. There is a natural equilibrium point beyond which, increasing team structure size exposes us heavily to **the law of diminishing returns**. In most cases making 10+ people teams is impractical and should be avoided. Generally, the smaller team is, the less we suffer from communication problems.

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But it’s really hard to imagine those huge and ambitious products are supported by only 10 people. And that leads us to...

### Divide and conquer

Probably, when you were reading the previous paragraph, you came to the natural conclusion about team structure - “We should then create two smaller teams instead of one big”. As we have hard constraints on human mental capacity, then we probably should move a slider with the label “number of teams”.

![Screenshot 2022-05-10 at 08.06.55.png](https://strapi-appunite.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_05_10_at_08_06_55_e76d3afa87.png)

It is one of those things about team topologies, which are simple but not easy. Facing that process implies several ramifications. The first scope of work needs to be divided somehow. If we hope to allow teams to achieve their full potential, we should aim to maximise their autonomy. That’s one of the tenets defining an agile team, it should be capable of delivering a stream of value independently through the whole stack. From discovery, design, development, and testing to maintaining it on the production. Being constantly blocked by the members of other teams violates the autonomy principle, cripples development and is devastating for the team morale.

There is another really interesting hue of dividing the work. It is associated with that internalised way of modelling code mentioned earlier in the article. Really often **Conway’s Law** comes into play. It says that *organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure*. So we can conclude that, if previously there was only one team which was working on some system, they created an architecture optimized for the way they work.

![Screenshot 2022-05-10 at 08.07.20.png](https://strapi-appunite.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_05_10_at_08_07_20_a7d1756fd1.png)

The fact that we decided to split a bigger team into 2 smaller ones, doesn’t automatically split our product into sub-products nor the underlying code or the architecture. And that can be problematic, because instead of being “enabled” folks in those teams will be struggling with the ecosystem. At first, their productivity will suffer from the team reconstitution process - after each change of team member, the team needs some time to “regel”. But moreover, changing team topologies has changed communications patterns. It’s a very important thing to remember when comes to team topologies - they need some space to adjust the reality with which they cope everyday, to those new patterns. 

But in the simpler words. If previously, they were working on a big monolithic application with collective ownership, they need to decide if they want to keep an architecture that way and just create a “softer” internal boundaries of ownership, with a joint release cycle. Or maybe the architectural drivers for those 2 parts of the product are incompatible to such an extent that it is beneficial to introduce a hard split, and spawning fully independent service.

I hope this article gave you some clue about what team topologies are and what are the most common obstacles when comes to creating team structures. Generally speaking, it’s heavily context dependent, and basically, throughout the above paragraphs, we were raising the sentence “it depends” to the power of infinity.




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If you are in post-MVP phase you need to optimize your team size. Read this article to find out how team topologies change communications patterns. 

Hubert Józwowiak

Junior Dev's first days. From writing to releasing your first commercial code