How Much it Costs to Develop a Social E-commerce App?

E-commerce in the future is going to happen on social platforms. Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are increasingly releasing features like buy buttons, e-commerce platform integrations, donate buttons, and shop now options. News feeds and timelines from your favorite sellers and buyers are the future of commerce. Instead of companies like Amazon, AliExpress pushes products to you on the homepage based on your recent history. Social E-commerce Platforms can show you the products only from the sellers you follow or from your friends buying. In this article, we will look at how much it would cost to develop MVP for a social e-commerce app. For example, consider something like Instagram but with a buy button and an option to purchase on the platform.

We believe in lean methodology and believe that an app should only be developed to the point where it can start generating feedback from users. Creating successful social marketplaces requires time and experimentation. It is best to create an MVP with the most important features and then does further development on user feedback and behavior.

1. Ability to follow/unfollow users or sellers.
2. Newsfeed with products from the users or sellers you follow.
3. Basic Chat between users without Picture/Video transfer(buyers/sellers).
4. Your profile.
5. Payment platform integration like Stripe marketplace or WePay so you can pay the sellers.
6. Payment options for buyers.
7. Orders Page.
8. Orders List.
9. Advanced and Basic Search for Users and Products.
    

I am giving a rough cost including all features given above and both the android and ios platforms as well as a website. Having a website that lists all your sellers with all their products is a good idea since this is going to bring organic traffic from Google. You can incentivize your web users to download the app. Price also depends on factors like where you are getting the app developed. In the US or Western Europe, the minimum viable product would cost at least  4 times more than our costs.

Price to Develop Social E-commerce platform on iPhone or Android (MVP)

The price to develop an Uber user app for iPhone and Android is approx $15,000 per platform. That is around $30,000 for both iPhone and Android platforms. The price to develop the backend Content management system and services for this app is estimated to be around $4000. The price to develop a website with a limited feature set of searching, product listing, and buying notifications is around $6000. Please note that for chat, selling and payment history, etc we can redirect users to download the app.

The total price to develop an app like this would be approximately $20,000 and the delivery time is about 3 to 4 months. For detailed estimates, you should contact us so we can give you the cost of developing your app.