How to Build a Buying and Selling App Like Haraj?

Digital marketplaces are currently all the rage, and many businesses are considering taking their solutions online, just like the Haraj app from Saudi Arabia. Every other business is on the hunt to outshine competitive digital commerce solutions in a creative yet innovative manner. This not only opens them up for new revenue streams but also adapts to the changing trend of the market, i.e., online shopping. A digital e-commerce app like Haraj has garnered massive attention and prominence in the UAE and has encouraged many entrepreneurs to invest in building an app like Haraj.

If you're looking to hire e-commerce app developers from a top e-commerce app development company, it's vital to answer the most vital question- What is the cost of building a buying and selling platform like Haraj? The market for e-commerce and shopping is an amazing space for creating an app like Haraj to cater to a wider range of audiences. The Haraj smart market module uses its app to encourage retailers to promote and sell their goods constantly. Hence, if you're looking for top mobile app ideas in eCommerce, you've stumbled upon the right blog. Let's dive right in.

What Is Haraj?

Established way back in 2007, Haraj is a top E-Commerce company based out of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. What started as a digital marketplace for cars further ventured up to the real estate segment and finally became the 1-stop shop for all classifieds. This online marketplace, to date, receives over half a million visitors every day. Its UX is pretty simple, uncomplicated, and loaded with top-tier advanced technologies at the backend. This constitutes an amazing environment for developers to understand the service structure and business module before jumping into the eCommerce app development market.

Being a leading online marketplace in the Arab region, Haraj has motivated many entrepreneurs to build similar apps for their regions. Although there are many questions to answer before answering the cost of building a buying and selling platform like Haraj, such as Should I hire eCommerce app developers or dedicated app developers from any reputed e-commerce app development company? The answer lies in a variety of factors and isn't a simple one. Let us break down the factors, features, and functionalities involved in the cost of developing an eCommerce app similar to Haraj.

Factors Affecting the Cost of Building an App like Haraj

The primary focus question of this blog is to determine the cost of building an online marketplace like Haraj. There is a variety of factors influencing the cost of developing an online marketplace like Haraj such as:

Development Complexity

The total number of features and compatibility across platforms not only increases the development timeline but also the cost of building a buying and selling platform like Haraj. Overall complexities impact the core development costs involved in your Haraj, like mobile app development. For instance, unique features and extensive customization options automatically lead to an increase in requiring more dedicated app developers' resources, in addition to surpassing the previously decided budget. Furthermore, when you wish to enhance your security features and render a user-friendly experience (both crucial), this will impact the costs.

Hire App Developers

Whether you're a startup or a fully booming enterprise, determining the precise cost to develop an app like Haraj depends largely on the type of app developers you get on board. Whether you approach an app development company in Saudi Arabia or hire eCommerce app developers via outsourcing you have to take care of their experience, expertise, and overall grasp of online marketplace development. Developers who work on developing an app like Haraj charge on an hourly, monthly, or quarterly basis, depending on the region you choose.

UI/UX Customization

A smartly designed user interface that is not only intuitive but also engaging is a vital requirement for any e-commerce app like Haraj. A uniform visual branding, typography, and imagery can enhance your marketplace brand value by 5x. Your marketplace app development includes factors like navigation, in-app buttons, product catalogs, menus, user flow, and other experience components, all of which are included in the comprehensive UI/UX section. It's essential to strike the right balance between the simplicity of features and the overall aesthetic appeal of the app to retain users. This also further increases the app's complexity, hence increasing the cost of developing an app like Haraj.

Latest Tech Stacks

While working on any eCommerce app development project like Haraj, it's important to utilize the latest technologies to deliver a successful app. Building a successful e-commerce app like Haraj requires the best frameworks, hosting infrastructure, and programming languages. Using prominent and well-supported technologies helps reduce developer load, delivery timelines, and overall costs in comparison to conventional proprietary tech stacks. The tools and technologies you choose to curate your marketplace platform will impact its performance and scalability.

Integrating with Third-Party Services

Incorporating third-party integrations performs a vital role when calculating the cost of building a buying and selling platform like Haraj. Implementing solutions such as payment gateway integration, multiple shipping providers, social media sharing, live tracking, and report and invoice generating functionalities in addition to other third-party capabilities will pivot the overall development cost drastically. However, all these services are important for providing users with a streamlined experience and optimizing overall performance.

Mandatory Features to Create App like Haraj

In order to determine the appropriate cost of building a buying and selling platform like Haraj, it needs the integration of some of its core features and functionalities. Its intricate features function like the spine of your app, which enables users to comprehend the app more conveniently. The features implemented by you should cater to the needs of both buyers and sellers. Let's check out some of the key features that are a must-have for an app like Haraj.

User Registration & Verification

This is one of the crucial features present in the Haraj app. Being a primary feature, user registration in addition to authentication and profile management is vital for any platform's database. Not only does it enable healthy communication between buyers and sellers, but also empowers curating personalized experiences and tracking everyday transactions. Other methods that advance your cost of building a marketplace app like Haraj are social media integration and multi-tiered user profiles. The intricacy of these features will also increase the complexity of development. Integrating powerful authentication tools not only improves security but also helps with user retention.

Product Catalog

Whenever you wish to create an app like Haraj, be sure to blend in a high-quality product catalog filled with product descriptions, details, quantity, specifications, high-quality photographs, and other niche details. Having neat and crisp product listing sections helps you manage your inventories and track out-of-stock products much more easily. Buyers get the flexibility of exploring multiple products boosting buyer confidence and enjoying the image processing technologies that come with its intuitive UI.

Smart Filter & Advanced Search Options

Whenever you desire to collaborate with an E-commerce app development company to build an app like Haraj, integrating smart features such as advanced search and filtering helps users look for relevant products in a short period. These functionalities enable and empower users to choose their budget range, and category of products, add their zip code, and other search criteria. Advanced search functionality greatly improves the user experience with its swift navigation capability from a sea of vast inventories. Such a complex system can be developed by incorporating AI and divulging into complex algorithms, but will also contribute greatly to platform success.

Payment Gateway Integration

Integrating trustable and reliant payment gateways is crucial for performing secure transactions within the app. Not only does it take care of customer's data, but also supports multiple methods for making payments like- online wallets, cashless transactions, bank transfers, Apple Pay, PayPal, and also credit/debit cards. This also helps you cater to diverse user preferences. To implement this, your business must adhere to your region's legal financial regulations and mandatory standards for data protection. The cost to develop an app like Haraj also needs to take care of capabilities such as cyber threat hunting, fraud detection alerts, and encryption.

Add to Cart & Wishlist

Users who use apps like Haraj, enjoy this key functionality to its fullest. From customizing your shopping cart to wishlisting your favorite products for future discounts or purchases is a thrill everyone enjoys in online shopping. Implementing these features enables users to optimize their virtual shopping cart before proceeding to checkout. This also helps streamline the buying process by allowing for improved management, better interface, and backend integration for smoothened operations and cross-device data synchronization. However, these functionalities will affect the overall platform’s usability and development cost in return for greater ROI.

Ratings & Reviews

Integrating sophisticated ratings and reviews functionality is vital to developing trust and transparency in the online marketplace. This feature empowers buyers to make informed decisions based on genuine brand and product reviews and sellers to work on their shortcomings for the future. Such a feature needs a quite sophisticated moderation system to avoid abuse and guarantee the genuineness of reviews. This will greatly increase the credibility of the app and enhance user experience.

Tailored Recommendations

Delivering personalized recommendations helps improve purchase power on a greater scale. Your app can be incorporated with algorithms that deeply study and analyze user behavior, purchase patterns, and buying frequency to deliver custom product recommendations. You can also integrate AI to tailor product suggestions as per individual choices. Artificial intelligence smoothly tracks user behavior, analyzes search history and previous purchase habits, and delivers highly similar guidance. Building an app like Haraj will require advanced AI algorithms and ML models, which in return will increase the development cost. Even though AI is a significant investment, it will prove to be an immaculate tool to accelerate the shopping experience, enhance sales operations, and retain audience loyalty.

Alerts & Social Sharing

Enabling active notifications, social sharing capabilities, and robust integrations will not only bring your consumers up to speed but allow buyers to conveniently share your products and improve marketplace activity largely. This will help your customers be aware of important things like the latest offer messages, SMSes, product queries, system push notifications, and changes in order. Social media sharing will help you achieve global exposure along with solid user interactions. Integrating these capabilities requires meticulous planning and execution so as not to hamper any privacy arena. Such investments will not only drive user growth but swiftly outweigh basic investments.

Cost Of Building A Buying And Selling Platform Like Haraj

The app development cost for any eCommerce solution depends on a variety of things. Even though there's no one-size-fits-all for top app ideas, here's a base pricing model provided by a reputed E-commerce app development company:

• Base MVP: MVP means Minimum Viable Product is pertaining to absolutely vital core functionalities. The average cost of building such an app will depend on approx $30,000 to $50,000. Some common features include payment gateway integration, registering users, product catalogs, and generic customer support options.
• Standard eCommerce App: In order to create app like Haraj, a standard marketplace app package is the benchmark you should consider. A bird-eye view of the cost to develop an eCommerce app like Haraj starts from anywhere between $80,000 and goes up to $200,000. This pricing range proffers an assortment of feature incorporation such as multiple shipping and payment gateway integrations, custom search filters, additional space for product descriptions, user ratings, and reviews. 
• Advanced Marketplace App: The cost to develop an eCommerce app that is loaded with all possible advanced features like Haraj goes easily above $200,000. Such an application is not only compatible with multiple devices but also loaded with features such as a delivery management system, social media sharing, in-app purchasing, and best-in-class search filter customizations.

Conclusion

Building a buying and selling platform like Haraj needs meticulous planning, ideation, conceptualization, and enforcement, plus substantial investments. The cost to develop an eCommerce app depends on a variety of factors like feature scope, cross-platform compatibility, overall UI/UX designs, QA testing, backend development, integration with third parties, and maintenance. By partnering with a leading E-commerce app development company like Hyperlink InfoSystem, you can establish clarity in your project requirements. From estimating accurate costings to guaranteeing successful app delivery, we take care of it all.

Have an app idea in mind that needs to be converted to reality? Connect with us today to brainstorm your app development ideas and receive a custom cost proposal for developing an app like Haraj.