Business-to-customer apps are the most popular sales model that sells products and services directly between a business and customers. The customers are known as the end-users of those products and services. Looking at the Google Play Stores and App Stores displays there are over a million B2C apps, the stores are flooded with apps but the success rate of almost half of the apps is questionable. Any difficulty in the B2C applications has a huge impact and they are directly visible to the customers. What aspects make the b2c apps special?
- UX/UI
- Performance
- Robustness
- Security and Privacy
- Deployment Agility
Why the User Experience and Interface?
So far we have understood that B2C applications will be used by the end users, they will be in thousands and they are not within our reach, and we cannot train them. Hence, the UX/UI should be friendly to drive their capabilities of understanding by themselves. Every user has plenty of options in the mobile app stores and they have high expectations from businesses. Since the B2C app is a primary channel from business to customers, any fault may create a blunder and impact the perception of users about the company’s quality and trustworthiness.
Importance of Performance & Robustness
As I said above customers always have high expectations from businesses, the bad performance and robustness affect user retention drastically. Keep in mind that the users are unforgiving. The negative feedback is cheap and customers act on bad performance. Once the application is uninstalled from their devices it is never going to be installed again. Furthermore, if your application is failing to manage the high number of concurrent users then computing the B2C market is hopeless for the business.
The Security and Privacy
People are concerned about their data protection. The application should be protected with GDPR and PCI compliance. Nowadays the applications are with offline capabilities and the data security in the local storage should be compliant with the SHA decryption methodologies.
Deployment needs the attention
You are living in the world of agility where customer expectations, business requirements, technology modernization, and application features are evolving frequently. In such a case deployment needs to have proper processes, and the technology should have a valid architecture that provides a controlled environment.
How to approach it?
The technique to facilitate the B2C application carrying its specialities could be the Microservice Architecture Design and its further benefits are as follows –
- Deployment Agility – The loosely coupled components under the microservice architecture eliminates the street dependencies that comfort you to plan smaller and controlled deployments. Can you imagine having a manufacturing unit working and enhancing without the microservices? It helps to create independent release cycles with multiple team units.
- Reusability – By having the functionality centralized in the services we can make it available for front-end, back-end, mobile app, external systems, and anyone to use. It promotes the concept of single implementation and centralized maintenance that reduce long-term costs.
- Monitoring – The microservices could be set with all the built-in features to monitor the error found in business logic, performance, and security.
- Scalability – Whenever the agility comes and the app demands to increase, you can increase the resources to the most needed microservices rather than scaling the complete application.
- Robustness – Since the components are loosely coupled and services are divided if any specific service breaks, the failure can be isolated and your critical application can keep running.
Security is important
The service needs to be secure with the method of authentication and authorization. You can use OAuth2, the technology Google uses to secure their APIs.
Don’t avoid the Speed of the Application
Suppose your application authorized the coupon code that could be used at a Point of Sale. A customer in the queue reached the counter and clicked on the app to check available coupons and allow them to use on his purchase. At that moment the customer wants to move with the speed of thought. So, adopt a few things to keep the application running faster –
- Bring the relevant information only to the device upfront
- Avoid the Jquery actions on the screen
- Perform load testing before your release in the market.
- Test application properly with the poor network and multiple device types
Don’t Underestimate the Application Release
Customer-centric applications get commercialized marketing. They are not the same as intranet apps that are only used by a few internal users. B2C apps have thousands of users from the first day to operate and benefit from their services. So, phase release is critical in this scenario. You may need to launch a fully developed application in one go and it looks scary. If you have any already existing applications take care of the existing data and its migration. Also, handle the user’s local storage in their devices.
The Solution
OutSystems has the immense potential to handle all your needs to develop a successful B2C application. Its architecture allows you to build applications with DDD (Domain Driven Design) Principles that help to Group concepts by functional area, dedicate multidisciplinary teams, and build light & stable service interfaces. Also, the Live Style Guide helps to create unified UI/UX throughout the entire application. Furthermore, the best practices help to manage data, security, performance, and maintainability of the application.