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Mobile apps play a crucial role in fostering direct connections between brands and their most loyal customers, relying heavily on the quality of the checkout process.
Buyers expect personalized and seamless experiences, while merchants require consistent business rules and capabilities. Shopify is at the forefront of this trend, offering Mobile Checkout Software Development Kits (SDKs) that promise to transform the mobile checkout experience.
The Future of Mobile Checkout
Shopify's Mobile Checkout SDKs offer mobile app developers a streamlined and efficient solution.
It empowers them to deliver a top-tier, conversion-optimized, highly customizable checkout experience in their applications. This innovation caters to businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises.
The kits provide a fully-featured checkout that preserves a merchant's customizations, business logic, and user interface extensions.
Notably, they eliminate the need for a separate checkout solution and outperform API-based integrations, which can only offer a limited subset of a merchant's business logic and necessitate continuous investment for maintenance.
Developer Preview Launch
In October 2023, Shopify announced the Developer Preview of the Mobile Checkout SDKs, starting with the Checkout SDK for iOS, with an Android version arriving soon.
The objective of this preview is to gather feedback from developers and merchants regarding the SDKs' APIs. It also helps identify areas for improvement or additional features. Both SDKs will transition to general availability by the end of 2023.
Why the Mobile SDKs Were Built
Creating a flawless checkout experience is a challenging task. It involves enforcing merchant rules, addressing buyer preferences, and adapting to various contexts. The complexity increases as numerous requirements, systems, and features interconnect and interact.
Shopify aims to simplify this process for businesses, allowing them to focus on what they do best without getting bogged down by these complexities.
API-based checkout solutions often fail to provide a consistent and complete experience, sometimes duplicating customizations.
According to Shopify's data, not only is building and maintaining a checkout UI from scratch more expensive, but it can also lead to a double-digit decrease in conversion rates compared to web-based checkouts.
This can hinder success on mobile and offer a poor return on investment. The Mobile Checkout SDKs are designed to overcome these challenges.
How the Shopify Mobile SDKs Work
The Mobile Checkout Software Development Kits offer a managed checkout experience that makes implementing an excellent mobile checkout simple. With just a few lines of code, developers can create a seamless checkout process that feels natural within their mobile app.
The SDK establishes a bridge protocol to the web checkout, handles customizations, and pre-fills checkout information. It also presents an optimized checkout sheet to the buyer. Smart preloading ensures instant checkout experiences for customers.
You'll find that the kits include support for app idiomatic features, automatically adjusting to light and dark modes based on the buyer's device settings. Furthermore, developers will soon have the ability to customize the checkout design. They'll be able to match their brand or reuse the same branding seen in a mobile browser.
Mobile Kit & Future Roadmap
Shopify's Mobile Kit is a suite of APIs and SDKs that empower developers to deliver top-notch iOS and Android commerce experiences. The Mobile Checkout SDKs are an extension of the Mobile Kit.
They complement the existing tools for building custom storefronts, product discovery flows, and identity management.
The ecommerce platform has exciting plans for the future. It includes:
- Updates to the Buy SDK for cart and storefront building
- New identity SDKs for customer authentication
- Account management in native apps in 2024
Getting Started
For developers interested in integrating the Mobile Checkout SDK into their apps, Shopify offers comprehensive documentation and a developer newsletter to stay informed about updates and new releases.
