A brick-and-mortar store’s ability to connect with shoppers is a main draw of shopping in person. On the other hand, e-commerce requires an understanding that online shopping differs from physical retailing, calling for proactive steps that mimic in-person experience as much as possible through sight and sound. Since the in-store experience extends beyond merchandise to ambiance, decor, and lighting, let alone the presence of sales associates, it makes sense that retailers are leveraging imagery, video, and other graphical elements to make shopping online similar to buying in store.
Adding code to display an image in your application is one of the most common tasks for almost every application developer. However, when it comes to Android applications, there is no inbuilt support for any image related tasks, which could be a potential pain when Android developers need to handle loading (and reloading) images into the view, handling the caching and memory issues, and supporting simple UI functionality.
How we browse online in our quest of information has largely been an unknown factor since the Internet became ubiquitous in the mid-1990s. What’s indisputable is that we’re unlikely to type in URLs as a start, especially if we don’t have clues as to which site to visit. Google search revolutionized the ability to find relevant information through keyword entries, leading to the emergence of search-engine optimization (SEO), whereby you as site owners ensure that the popular keywords appear in your content.
ExoPlayer, a media player for Android, was developed and is being maintained by Google as an alternative for Android’s default MediaPlayer. Among ExoPlayer’s advantages over MediaPlayer are dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH), smooth streaming, and common encryption. A major advantage, however, is ExoPlayer’s easy customization.
Recently we added the Cloudinary Demo - eCommerce App to the Google Play Store. This app demonstrates the best practices for optimal delivery of images on a storefront, including category pages, product pages, and a shopping cart. At the time, we published Introducing the Cloudinary Demo Android App, Part 1, which provided an under-the-hood tour of how the eCommerce Android App was designed and how Cloudinary was integrated throughout.
TL;DR
We live in a visual world, often while on the go, and consumers expect media-rich web content. Accordingly, the loading speed of images and videos is a big factor in user experience. To optimize customer satisfaction with mobile content, you must focus on the quality, format, and size of your digital assets. With Cloudinary, optimization is simple, not only enhancing your mobile web and app performance but also upping your SEO game and boosting customer satisfaction.
React Native is a popular open source software that enables you build mobile applications easily with JavaScript. Other similar and popular options out there include Ionic, Lungo, Sencha Touch and NativeScript Vue. You can use your existing knowledge of HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to develop mobile applications without having to learn a different set of skills.
Currently, the Android platform boasts the highest demand for mobile solutions, as evidenced by Google’s announcement in 2017 that there were two billion monthly active Android devices, a number that is likely to increase in the years ahead. For app developers like you, now is the right time to build and release solutions for Android. you might have also noticed that a higher percentage of apps being developed nowadays are filled with visual media: images and videos.
Globally, approximately two billion people now own smartphones, which also feature cameras capable of capturing photos and videos of a tonal richness and quality unimaginable even five years ago. Until recently, those cameras behaved mostly as optical sensors, catching light that determines the resulting image's pixels. The next generation of cameras, however, can blend hardware and computer-vision algorithms that apply to an image's semantic content, spawning creative mobile photo and video apps.
For this post we spoke with Thomas Smale, eCommerce expert and founder of FE International, a leading M&A advisor for online businesses, on what considerations eCommerce companies should be making when it comes to creating optimal mobile experiences.