Scrums.com is revolutionizing the way growth companies scale their engineering teams. Our platform offers access to top-notch remote software engineering teams at an affordable subscription price.
Get startedWorld-class app development that allows you to start, run and grow your business.
Building a custom app can boost your brand's trust and credibility, ultimately benefiting your business in the long run. We will discuss the following topics:
1. Reputation Management
2. Customer Support and Engagement
3. Data-Driven Decision Making
4. Demonstrating Social Responsibility
A well-made custom app can dramatically improve your brand's marketability and reputation. A trustworthy app will show that you are dedicated to providing top-notch goods and services. As a result of knowing they can rely on you, your clients and business partners will have more faith in you.
A custom app also strengthens your brand identification by demonstrating your professionalism and attention to detail.
A custom app enables you to offer personalized customer support and engagement, helping you address the unique needs and pain points of your African target market.
By incorporating in-app support features, such as chatbots, help centres, or direct communication channels, you can provide timely assistance to your users, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
This level of support also encourages users to share their positive experiences with others, further boosting your brand's credibility.
You may get useful user data through custom app creation, giving you insights into user behavior and preferences. You may improve your app and broader business strategy by studying this data and making wise decisions.
Delivering a more individualized experience for your users is made possible by a data-driven strategy. This helps to increase their faith in your brand and ultimately ensures that they will stay visiting.
Putting money into a customized app that caters to your target market's needs demonstrates your commitment to social responsibility.
You can showcase your brand's dedication to having a beneficial influence by developing an app that takes into account regional difficulties, environmental issues, or social issues that are pertinent to your audience.
This thoughtful approach to app creation not only strengthens the integrity of your brand, but it also appeals to customers who value companies with a clear sense of mission.
World-class app development that allows you to start, run and grow your business.
Imagine custom app development as an expert chef crafting a personalised menu for their restaurant. Just as a meticulously planned and executed meal can leave diners with a memorable culinary experience, a custom app is specifically designed to cater to your business's distinct needs and objectives, leaving a lasting impression on your users.
Investing in custom app development offers several advantages, including:
A custom app allows you to create an interface that is tailored to your target audience, ensuring a seamless and enjoyable experience. By focusing on the preferences and expectations of your users, you can craft an app that not only meets their needs but also delights them with personalized features and intuitive navigation.The best part? If you develop an app that your users love, you ensure that they keep coming back for more and turn them into lifelong customers.
Custom apps can be designed to streamline business processes and boost productivity. By automating repetitive tasks, integrating with existing systems, and providing real-time data access, custom apps empower your team to work more efficiently and make informed decisions quickly, just like a well-tailored suit that enables effortless movement and comfort.
A unique app helps you stand out from the competition and attract more customers. In a world where off-the-shelf solutions are abundant, a custom mobile app acts as a distinctive and exclusive suit that sets you apart in the crowd, showcasing your brand's personality and commitment to providing a superior experience.
A well-designed app can generate increased revenue and improve customer retention. By offering a memorable and engaging user experience, your custom app encourages users to continue using your services and make purchases. It's akin to wearing a sharp, tailored suit that not only grabs attention but also instils trust and confidence in your brand, ultimately resulting in increased profitability.
Custom app development enables seamless integration with your existing systems and third-party applications. This ensures a smooth flow of data between various platforms, enhancing communication and collaboration within your organization. The ability to integrate effortlessly is like having a versatile tool that easily connects and works in harmony with other components in your business ecosystem.
As your business evolves, a custom app can be easily modified or expanded to accommodate changing requirements and market trends. This adaptability is like having a dynamic strategy that can be adjusted and fine-tuned to suit your business's changing needs, ensuring continued relevance and success in an ever-changing environment.The benefits don’t just stop there though. If you want to build trust and credibility with your customers, a custom app is a great way to do so.
Investing in custom app development can be expensive, but being open to pivoting and iterating based on market feedback is crucial to ensure long-term success. By adapting your app to the ever-changing needs and preferences of your target market, you can stay ahead of the competition, increase user satisfaction, and maximize your return on investment.
Encourage users to provide feedback and reviews, which will help you identify pain points and areas for improvement. By addressing these concerns, you demonstrate your commitment to serving the unique needs of your users, enhancing your app's credibility and increasing user satisfaction. Tools like in-app surveys, app store reviews, or social media can be used to gather feedback and gauge user sentiment.
Analyze user behaviour and engagement data to understand how your app is being used and identify potential bottlenecks or areas of friction. By making data-driven decisions, you can prioritize improvements and new features that will resonate with your audience, maximizing the impact of your development budget and efforts.
As you adapt your app based on market feedback, be prepared to allocate resources for ongoing updates and improvements. While this may increase your app's overall cost, the benefits include increased user satisfaction, reduced churn, and ultimately, higher long-term profitability. Regular updates also demonstrate your commitment to delivering a high-quality app experience tailored to your users' needs.
Adopt a flexible, agile development methodology that enables prompt iteration and change in response to market feedback.
Your app will stay relevant and helpful to your target market if you are receptive to user needs and can swiftly pivot and make adjustments.
By prioritizing products and enhancements that have the greatest impact, an agile methodology can also assist you in managing development expenses more successfully.
While it's essential to iterate and adapt your app based on user feedback, it's also crucial to balance this with innovation and forward-thinking. Continuously explore new technologies, trends, and market opportunities to ensure your app stays ahead of the curve and caters to the evolving needs of your user base. By striking the right balance between adaptation and innovation, you can maintain a competitive edge and secure long-term success for your app.
Creating an outstanding user experience and design is crucial for a successful app. A well-designed app should be visually appealing, intuitive, and user-friendly.
Higher app adoption rates and greater client retention result from spending money on excellent design and user experience. A well-designed app has a higher likelihood of being passed along by users and being used again, which leads to better ratings, word-of-mouth advertising, and long-term success.
In today's interconnected digital world, app security is paramount. We take a look at some vital security considerations.
The Privacy Act of 1974 is the primary privacy regulation in America that regulates the sharing of data. The Privacy Act governs how federal agencies may gather, utilize, and disclose personal information. Individuals are given specific rights under it, including the ability to access and update their personal information, and federal agencies are required to protect such data from illegal disclosure.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for health information, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) for financial information, and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) for children's online data are just a few federal laws that deal with privacy and data sharing in addition to the Privacy Act. Additionally, each state has its own privacy laws that could offer additional protections.
Keep up with the latest security threats and best practices, such as incorporating multi-factor authentication, securing APIs, and using secure coding practices. Regular security audits and vulnerability assessments can help identify potential weaknesses and protect your app from emerging threats.
Select a reputable development partner with a proven track record in security best practices, like Scrums. A reliable vendor will prioritize security throughout the development process and help you build a secure app that meets industry standards and best practices.
Scrums.com provides high quality engineering teams to scaling enterprises at lower costs. Scrums.com designs, builds, deploys and maintains custom software that gives scale-ups the opportunity to grow world-class businesses.
Scrums.com provides high quality engineering teams to scaling enterprises at lower costs. Scrums.com designs, builds, deploys and maintains custom software that gives scale-ups the opportunity to grow world-class businesses.
Quality user stories into production rate
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Successful projects delivered
Years of software specialisation
Amazon is the world’s largest and most successful eCommerce platform, allowing millions of consumers to purchase everything from household products to streaming services. Building an app like Amazon is a complex endeavor that combines elements of eCommerce shopping, inventory management, real-time logistics, and personalized experiences, all driven by sophisticated algorithms.
When developing an app similar to Amazon, several factors come into play, including platform choice, back-end architecture, user experience (UX), and integrations with third-party systems. Each factor uniquely influences the total app development cost, especially in the U.S. market. The development cost is also impacted by the scale of features required to handle features like inventory management, payment gateways, user personalization, and robust seller platforms.
In this article, we’ll highlight the components that drive the cost of building an app like Amazon, from upfront development factors to long-term maintenance requirements. Whether your app will focus on a niche product market or broader mass-market appeal, understanding the range of elements that affect your budget is essential.
A crucial factor in determining development cost is the app’s platform compatibility. An app like Amazon needs to be available on multiple platforms—especially mobile (iOS, Android), desktop, and web-based apps. Each type of platform comes with its own set of development challenges, directly affecting costs.
Given the dominant presence of both iOS and Android in the U.S., launching an Amazon-style eCommerce app on only one platform will limit your customer reach. While iOS development tends to be more streamlined due to the uniformity of Apple devices, the Android ecosystem is notoriously fragmented, with various device models, screen sizes, and OS versions influencing the time and cost it takes to ensure seamless functionality.
iOS users in the U.S. tend to spend more on premium features, while Android users dominate in terms of numbers, meaning that developing for both platforms is crucial for long-term success. However, this dual-platform approach also increases upfront costs.
To minimize costs, adopting cross-platform frameworks like Flutter or React Native is a practical alternative that allows the use of a single codebase for both platforms. However, native app functionalities might not be as performant, and complex integrations required for a seamless eCommerce experience could be limited by cross-platform solutions.
For an eCommerce platform like Amazon, desktop and web applications play a significant role in the user journey. Many users browse products on desktops, so expanding app compatibility to desktop versions (Windows and Mac) and ensuring web-based capabilities are crucial. These add significant layers to the development process but are essential for reaching a wider audience, ensuring consistency in the online shopping experience.
Therefore, the cost of ensuring that your app works seamlessly across mobile, desktop, and web platforms will depend on the complexity and scale of features integrated across each device type.
At a basic level, an eCommerce app like Amazon should include:
These are considered standard features necessary to launch the app’s Minimum Viable Product (MVP), but only cover the app’s fundamentals.
As you aim to mirror Amazon’s deep functionality, intermediate features will boost overall usability:
These added features provide value to both users and sellers, driving further development complexity and cost.
If you’re aiming to fully replicate Amazon’s comprehensive marketplace functionality, the app will need more advanced features :
Building AI-based tools or AR features demands more significant investments in machine learning, augmented reality technologies, and customized infrastructure, drastically increasing the overall development cost.
Design is an essential aspect of an app like Amazon, where user satisfaction and consumer trust are vital to success. An attractive UX and UI design can improve engagement, increase interaction, and ultimately grow revenue by ensuring a seamless flow from product browsing to purchase.
For an eCommerce app, providing a minimalistic and easy-to-navigate interface is key. While Amazon offers many features, presenting too much information at once can overwhelm the user. Ensuring scalable simplicity without sacrificing depth is a challenge that requires thoughtful user journey mapping.
Customizing the flow for U.S. consumers—who expect a clean interface with clear product descriptions, ratings, and secure checkout portals—should be the key focus. Visual hierarchy (such as clear call-to-action buttons for "Buy Now") can drive conversions directly, while well-placed social proof (like reviews and ratings) builds buyer confidence.
U.S. shoppers increasingly expect apps to remember their preferences, offer location-based customization, and deliver personalized product suggestions seamlessly. As your app scales, the complexities of creating a personalized shopping experience at every touchpoint (based on buying behavior, geographical preferences, etc.) adds layers to both the backend integrations and the design phase.
Beyond aesthetic appeal, incorporating design elements that engage users—such as optimized filter systems, simple wishlist creations, and one-click purchase workflows—drives brand loyalty. For user retention, the app must offer a smooth checkout experience, especially on smaller screens like smartphones.
Spending more on a refined user experience can significantly increase upfront costs, but it amplifies returns by boosting user retention and reducing cart abandonment rates.
Read more about User Centered App Design.
Integrations with multiple third-party services ensures the smooth functioning of an eCommerce platform. Amazon’s widespread influence owes much to its superior integration with third-party logistics, payment gateways, and analytics tools that shape inventory management and advertising.
Business-to-consumer apps like Amazon must accommodate multiple payment options to satisfy U.S. customer expectations. This includes conventional methods like credit/debit cards and more modern integrations like PayPal, Stripe, and Google Pay.
Managing compliance with payment regulations, including PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), adds to the cost but is essential for securing customer payments and maintaining trust.
Amazon is renowned for offering fast delivery, thanks to its integration with multiple logistics partners and in-house warehouses. To replicate this, your app would need to include real-time inventory tracking, shipment integration APIs, and robust order management systems. Integrating with services like FedEx, DHL, or UPS for delivery tracking, along with vendors managing their stock in real-time, requires substantial backend support.
An in-app analytics tool like Google Analytics or Mixpanel will help sellers and the platform owner monitor seller and buyer behaviors, sales conversions, and inventory replenishment needs. Amazon also offers direct marketing features like sponsored listings and advertising placements, adding layers of complexity and third-party integration with advertising APIs.
Integrating these advanced third-party services into your app opens up business potential but drives development costs as every API interaction needs to be managed, tested, and continually updated for compatibility.
Developing an app at the scale of Amazon requires a highly scalable and secure backend infrastructure that will support millions of transactions, users, and products simultaneously.
To ensure the app runs smoothly—even during high-traffic shopping periods (Black Friday, Cyber Monday)—your infrastructure must be prepared to handle massive amounts of data in real-time. Cloud hosting services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure are most often used to support eCommerce apps, offering scalable solutions as the user base grows.
With database management, users expect to view product images and details without long load times. Having a robust content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare optimizes website speed but adds additional infrastructure complexity.
Features such as live price syncing, real-time inventory updates, and reliable customer service directly on the app put a high load on the database and server processing. The database should integrate flawlessly with the front-end to ensure updates, such as price changes or product availability, show immediately and consistently across platforms.
Building in such resiliencies and redundancies often involves complex server-side scripting and advanced database architecture, increasing costs.
Maintenance for a large-scale app like Amazon is a continuous process that demands regular updates, upgrades, and security patches. As your user base scales, problems like bugs, crashes, and glitches will need prompt resolution.
In order to remain competitive, your app will require constant updates that enhance the user experience, improve efficiency, and keep up with consumer behavior changes. These updates could range from improving product filtering and recommendation engines, to adding payment gateway upgrades or additional delivery service APIs.
Regular security patches are also essential for eCommerce apps. U.S. apps need to comply with regulations like the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), and protecting user data requires real-time encryption solutions for payment and personal data. Fixing security loopholes is an ongoing expense, and ensuring that backend systems maintain PCI compliance helps avoid violations and penalties.
The expertise required to develop an Amazon-like app far exceeds what smaller-scale apps may need. You’ll need talent across multiple industries, from finance to logistics, UI/UX, and data science.
To build complex functionalities like real-time bidding, global logistics integration, and multi-channel ordering, you’ll need highly skilled technical experts. Developers with specialized knowledge in machine learning, cloud infrastructure, and real-time database systems will drive costs higher due to the niche demand.
A U.S.-based development team offers the benefit of understanding local user preferences, laws, and regulatory concerns like CCPA compliance. For a large app like Amazon, these U.S.-based considerations can affect user interactions, data handling, and regional server requirements.
Alternatively, partnering with reliable offshore development teams based in regions like Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia can drive costs down significantly without compromising on development quality. However, managing an offshore team may require additional project management, communication tools, and time-zone coordination, influencing the overall costs and timelines.
Systematic testing is critical to ensure the app performs properly in various U.S. regions, devices, operating systems, or network conditions. Performance testing for scalability, especially during seasonal sales, is essential to avoid app downtime during high-traffic periods.
When submitting the app for distribution on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, you’ll incur launch and maintenance fees, along with paying a percentage of revenue from in-app sales. Both platforms require developers to follow strict guidelines and charge 30% commission on in-app purchases or subscription models, which can impact your margins.
You’ll need to factor in legal and compliance costs related to eCommerce, including tax regulations and privacy laws for U.S.-based customers. Handling transactions correctly and adhering to PCI-DSS compliance for credit card payments ensures the safe handling of sensitive payment information.
Additionally, understanding and complying with CCPA and GDPR regulations ensures that customers' data is protected, which becomes part of the ongoing development and compliance costs for an app that processes massive amounts of customer data, like Amazon.
Building an Amazon-like app is unique in terms of both its scale and the wide range of integration points required to deliver an effective user experience. The app isn’t just an eCommerce platform—it’s a fully integrated ecosystem, incorporating real-time data, advanced logistics, and payment processing technologies to ensure seamless interactions between buyers, sellers, and delivery networks.
The U.S. market, in particular, places immense value on speed, convenience, and security, so your development team will need to focus heavily on optimizing performance, ensuring a seamless checkout experience, and integrating all the factors that play into eCommerce interactions (logistics, payments, reviews, etc.).
An advanced platform like Amazon constantly evolves based on market dynamics, requiring regular development updates, API integration, and customer feedback. Developing advanced AI algorithms for recommendations and dynamic pricing will help differentiate the app but requires a skilled technical team at the helm.
At Scrums.com, our development team focuses on eCommerce platforms and understands every aspect of building scalable, secure, and user-friendly apps. Contact us to discuss your project and get a custom development estimate today!