The Final 20% of an Ecommerce App

On Pranab’s site

DRAFT (needs work or removal)

Ecommerce apps are everywhere at this stage. (Welcome to capitalism in the internet age, I guess.) While they all achieve the basic functionality to some degree or the other, I have a few ideas (turns out to be two) to take them to the next level.

Advanced Search🔗

First, show search recommendations immediately, including autocomplete suggestions, similar searches by other people, products that fit the recommendation, and more. Matching products can even show thumbnails and additional data in a card-like format.

Second: typo resilience. Spotify, for example, has some amazing “typo resilience” — even if you make a mistake in your typing, Spotify will find the song you were looking for. The term is actually called “fuzzy matching”, I believe, and there are lots of different types of matching that you can adapt to your specific product.

Notes🔗

This one is a bit out there, and based on an assumption: people have large lists and forget what they were looking for as they go through the process of searching out each item, scrolling around, and then adding it to their cart, before repeating it for the next item.

Instead, have them type out their shopping list into a text field, with each item on a separate line. Help them with some smart suggestions (like language-aware autocomplete in a code editor) and at the end run a program to find those items and suggest them in an interactive UI.

Remember to keep the note they wrote until they’re done. Sometimes they might have typed the wrong item, or you were unable to find the product, or you matched the wrong product, or there were multiple matches. Allow them to refine their search or discard it themselves. Probably delete the list after they checkout. Or maybe when they leave the notes page/screen, though they might switch over just to take a peek at something else.

Remember though, before all of this, to just make your app fast and correct, even if it is basic.