A strange year for the world. A strong year for mobile.
Let’s rewind and update you on our journey to connect brands to their biggest fans. 2020 was of course a dramatic year with COVID-19 as the root cause of everything. We are incredibly sad to see the hardship of people getting ill, all the beautiful stores close and the uncertainty it brings to the brands on our platform. On the bright side we are glad that the app provides an important growing sales channel in these times. Let us take you through our progress this year.
This year we launched the first App Clip for fashion brands. App Clips are a new innovation from Apple: a small part of your official app can now be presented without the need to download the main app first. The App Clip we created allows customers to easily learn more about in-store products by presenting content that is available digitally.
After scanning an App Clip QR code, customers can shop entire looks from your mannequins or shopping windows.
We created the possibility to add a product list to the app’s home wall that is filled with products from an existing category. These lists can be created and managed in Studio, our App Content CMS. This is a great way to promote products from a specific category when customers open the app.
Home titles allow our brands’ merchandizers to add titles (including translations) to home merchandize images and thus help the localisation process for our customers. 🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪
To help consumers stay informed when their favorite products are re-stocked, we introduced the ‘back in stock’ functionality earlier in 2020. Within a few taps, customers can be notified when their product are back in stock again. 🔔
With this redesign we made the order history completely native. This allowed us to integrate it more efficiently in the code base and allows us to take advantage of native features and speed improvements. We also gave it a fresh new design.
Looking at the current smartphone market, big devices (5,5 inch and up) are here to stay. With mobile screen sizes increasing we also keep looking to improve the app’s navigation. By moving down the category navigation to the bottom of the screen, everything becomes available for one handed use.
By moving down the navigation to the bottom of the screen. You can keep shopping while using the phone with one hand. Perfect for when you are on the go.
Animations help customers understand how they navigate the app’s categories. For example, the bar moves vertically when you dive deeper in the category tree.
We released a new preview functionality in our Studio CMS that makes reviewing content in the live app super easy. Merchandizers can simply scan a QR code and preview the content on their device. ⚡️
We believe our apps should be usable for everybody. This is why we invested time in improving the app’s accessibility features. With these improvements we optimised the use of accessibility features that are available natively on the iOS and Android platforms.
Home merchandise can already be linked to a wide variety of app content. We are expanding this with a new link type: App views. This will allow brands to link home merchandise to existing app views like “Account” or “Search”.
This feature allows brands to give away a free product to your customers when they have reached a certain set of rules. An example could be: “Get a free hat when spending €50”. The gift is presented delightfully adding to the joy of shopping from the app. 😃
Physical stores are a big part of the customer journey and for many brands on our platform an important channel to build the brand. Previously, everyone already had the opportunity to add a store finder through an app extension. With the release of the native store finder, we add a lot of performance and ux improvements by using native code. This is also a fundamental step for the in-store customer journey that we’re working on in 2020 and 2021.
The store finder is built completely natively and runs just as smooth as other parts of the app. Finding the right store now becomes so much easier.
Use your location to find a nearby store and its information. Check the opening hours of your store and start navigating when you are ready to go.
Publishing a great shopping app requires more than just building a great consumer experience. It also requires advanced infrastructure and security projects in the backend to keep the apps running at all times. 🔐
With this feature we enabled brands to utilize the promotions setup of Salesforce Comerce Cloud. When brands configure a promotion, these can be exposed to consumers in the cart so that they have all the information they need to make purchase decisions.
Every few weeks brands can look forward to new features on the Highstreet platform. Stay tuned for very cool stuff coming in 2021.
And last but not least, In 2020 we welcomed many amazing new brands to our platform – here are a few of them.
Do you want to learn more about Highstreet and how to create beautifully designed app experiences that will help you grow your business? Leave us a note and we will come back to you.
