Mary Yasensky Delivery Manager

• Business
• Flutter

June 18, 2024 5 min read

How Flutter E-Commerce App Can Help You Win the Market Competition

There are numerous reasons to explore Flutter e-commerce app development and the possibilities it provides. If you are an e-commerce marketer, you definitely know how competitive the field is. The number of new companies keeps growing, and the existing ones are looking for new ways to increase sales. One undeniable advantage of Flutter for e-commerce, among other things, is the ability to promptly expand the range of sales channels with a single code base. Besides, it provides a competitive edge by reducing time-to-market and greatly accelerating innovation.

Since 2019, we’ve created over a dozen cross-platform apps, including e-commerce ones, and clearly see a full range of its benefits and drawbacks. Let’s explore them.

How can a company benefit from Flutter e-commerce app

When it comes to employing Flutter in the sphere of e-commerce, businesses can enjoy numerous benefits associated with the framework.

E-commerce project management

Team management. Given that your e-commerce solution for both mobile platforms is created on the same code base, you’ll be working with only one development team. This greatly simplifies project communication and synchronization.

Cost of e-commerce application. In addition to simplifying team management, cross-platform development can save your company about 40% of the budget since you won’t have to pay for two native products — separately for iOS and Android. In total, native app creation comes out to about $64,000 compared to $51,000 on average for a cross-platform project.

Technology-based advantages

In terms of technological features, the Flutter software development kit has much to offer.

Dart-based origin

The framework is based on Dart, which is extremely flexible and unique. The fact is that Dart uses both JIT and AOT compilers, several transpilers, and its own parser gives Dart several significant advantages:

• Direct building of native code without using JavaScript which prevents bugs that frequently occur during the compilation process.
• Fast-paced development cycles.
• Hot Reload makes it unnecessary to restart all the code to see the updates in the UI — with it, they can be seen almost instantly.

Close-to-native performance

The high performance is a credit to the Skia graphics engine and the framework’s architecture. They allow high loading speed and perfect graphics and animations up to 120 FPS at the same time. The creators have recently introduced a new graphics engine called Impeller, the 3.3 version of which now allows the application interface to run incredibly smoothly without any slowdowns. Slowdowns, in turn, may be a real conversion killer in e-commerce apps.

Security

Thanks to Dart base, the application’s code is encrypted so that it can’t be recovered by reverse engineering. It makes the software even more protected than in Java, Kotlin, or React Native.

Test automation

All bugs and errors are detected immediately, making the final product high quality and reducing overall development time. We at Surf have implemented this many times and successfully handled it even with bank app testing, where bugs and errors are unacceptable. This explains why we are so confident about our expertise in automated e-commerce testing. 

Proven e-commerce success stories powered by Flutter

In this part, we will take a look at successful use cases of Flutter for building e-commerce apps, both by our team and other app developers.

Online pharmacy chain: 6 apps in 5 months

Our Client, a large pharmacy chain, needed an e-commerce application for each of its 3 brands and planned to develop them using native technologies. Along the way, native development turned out to be quite expensive even for a well-established business: 3 Android and iOS projects for each store made 6 apps in total. To save resources, we suggested the Client develop a cross-platform application on Flutter.

We developed all apps with Flutter, which made the simultaneous creation of iOS and Android projects possible. Think of it as a smart flexible template: we created the codebase for the anchor brand and reused 80-95% of its source code to build apps for subsidiary brands, adapting the unique functions and user experience (UX) to the specifics of each (think of it as a smart flexible template).

The entire process took approximately 5 months. Thanks to Flutter, the Client saved 40% of their budget and got a high-performance product. Nowadays, around 70% of the pharmacy chain’s purchases are made via applications, and the average check has increased many times over.

Xianyu: re-commerce app with half a billion users

Xianyu is an online C2C platform created by e-commerce giant Alibaba for reselling used goods. As of 2024, the platform has over 500 million users. It was also among the first businesses in 2018 to use Flutter for the creation of e-commerce apps. And it ultimately paid off:

• Xianyu optimized the application architecture. The company made a unified platform for all the layers by bringing together Flutter and FaaS models with Nexus API. It allowed Xianyu to speed up the process of delivering updates.
• The company improved its R&D management system by shrinking the workload for both iOS and Android teams and unifying the developers’ tech stacks. The team now uses Flutter as the main tool and HTML5 as the secondary.

eBay Motors: native look and feel with Flutter

eBay Motors is a niche online marketplace for buying and selling exclusive pre-owned cars. At some point, the company decided to develop an e-commerce app for Motors, as the community was expected to grow, and eBay wanted some sort of unification across all of its subsidiaries. Native development was too complicated and time-consuming for eBay Motors’s small team, given the deadlines set by eBay. Among the solutions available, a cross-platform application was the most suitable one. After a thorough research, eBay chose Flutter as it had all the necessary SDKs, provided a native feel of an app, and allowed them to meet tight deadlines. The platform also leverages Firebase machine learning capabilities for image categorization.

Bottom line

Flutter can help you gain the upper hand in the competitive e-commerce niche by delivering your app to the market significantly faster. And you don’t have to sacrifice performance, data security, or the look and feel of your app. However, it is very important to find a team of experts who understand your business perfectly and have the proper level of expertise in Flutter. Check our tips on picking engineers for your project or contact us right away.