Small businesses can make great use of apps to expand on their services and reach out to more customers, but often they are hesitant to step into the app industry. Like most things it’s typically an economic concern, but the app development cost/benefit analysis is complicated by the fact that many people don’t have a confidant understanding of the numbers involved.
Small business apps are most often based around extending existing services onto mobile platforms. This means that the tools and features involved are not as complex as you might find in larger budget apps, such as major games or enterprise business tools. Small businesses generally don’t need to worry about accruing major app development cost for inventing new technologies; the mobile app is simply expanding what is already in place.
For the sake of explanation, let’s imagine a small eCommerce business. Their primary focus is their web service which enables sales, though they also deal with various logistical concerns, such as warehouse organization and shipping. As for making money, though, it’s all about getting people onto the website and converting them into sales.
The App Advantage
A simple, but valuable, mobile app would adapt their existing online shopping experience to an app interface. How much would this benefit the business? Well, as of now mobile devices account for nearly 20% of web traffic (and growing). That essentially means that up to 20% of the eCommerce website’s customers could be coming from mobile users, and likely they are not reaching this potential. What the app does, therefore, is expand its services for that group. By creating a better platform for those users, the business invites more traffic and better conversion rates.
Apps are easier to use, faster, and more useful than a mobile website could ever be. For starters an app is less power and data intensive, as it can rely less on its 3G or LTE connection (making it easier on the battery and easier on the bill). Second, it would be a native mobile interface, which is ideal for offering a familiar and easy to use UX. And most importantly, apps can have some useful features that are unavailable to websites. For instance, the app might allow offline browsing, or receive real-time alerts as their order is packed and shipped.
I use a web-based business as an example simply because the web is so integral to most modern businesses. For others, like landscape architects or car mechanics, a lot of business occurs person to person, but this doesn’t mean apps become less useful. Mobile apps can bring improved mobile accessibility to common web services like appointment scheduling at an affordable app development cost. But the exciting stuff comes from more pioneering businesses; just think what an edge you’d have over competitors if your customers could use your app to create landscape design mock-ups to visualize their ideas, or get a handy visual guide for emergency car repair (with personalized reminders for regular maintenance).
The first thing is to find some services you already offer that can be transferred to a mobile platform. With that as a foundation, you are free to experiment and try to think of interesting features to bring to your customers.
App Development Costs
A baseline app, such as simply putting the eCommerce store into an app interface, would be able to utilize the existing databases, servers, and payment portals which power the web store. As a result, the app would probably cost somewhere between 10 to 20 thousand dollars to design and build, depending on how easily the existing services can be integrated into the app. It’s possible that a simple app could cost even less, as little as $2,000.
Of course, as more features are included, app development costs go up. Generally speaking it is well worth the cost to add unique and useful tools to an app, as these are the features that make the app stand out. The end-users are all that really matter; as long as they enjoy the app and find it consistently useful, it will be a valuable asset to your business, and with more features, user engagement improves—though there is definitely a point of diminishing returns, and rampant feature-cramming can actually hurt the app by confusing users, so it’s important to choose your services carefully. Thus it’s rare for a small business app to exceed $50,000.
With the right features (and especially with SDI’s affordable cost design and development) the app could very quickly pay for itself. Each app will have a primary monetization strategy based on the business that created it—in the case of our imaginary eCommerce site that would be the additional sales from mobile customers—but depending on the expected return and the tendencies of a business’ typical customers, a company may elect to include another monetization method such as a small ad banner within the app to supplement the revenue.
A Growing Mobile Audience
It’s hard to determine exactly how many active smartphones are out there, but we do know that in Q3 of 2013 roughly 250 million new smartphones were sold. Some estimates put the total number of active smartphones at well over 1 billion. Regardless of the exact number, it should be enough to know that the number is really, really big, and is only getting bigger.
The app industry is growing right along with it. The number of things which laptops and desktops do better than mobile devices is shrinking fast, and we are more and more concerned with being able to perform tasks on the go. Looking ahead, it seems that mobile devices will soon be taking over the greater portion of our computing experience.
The key for small businesses is to establish a nice, simple feature-set to expand their business and bring something useful to mobile customers while keeping app development costs low. The specific features will be different for every business, of course, but the growth of mobile is universal. For a relatively small investment, businesses can create new, long-term mobile assets which help them reach out to the most important modern trend: the growing mobile demographic.
If you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you want (or if not, we can help lay out a concept) and you want a more personalized app development cost estimate, you’ll have to talk to an app expert. Luckily you can get a free quote and consultation by calling 408.802.2885 or emailing team@sdi.la
