Distinctive Features & Cost to Develop an App Like Airbnb

The generation today is seeking on-demand solutions for almost everything. The travel and hospitality industries are no different. That’s the reason apps like Airbnb now hold around 15% of the share in the total vacation rental market.

Airbnb has dominated the market for the last few years, because of its features and on-demand services at economical prices. It’s a one-stop solution for travellers, whether they want to book hotels, apartments, experiences, and more. Along with the travellers, the app is also helping the hosts to find new consumers easily for their homes and apartments. Today, Airbnb is serving more than 190 countries.

Many businesses in the travel and hospitality industries are now looking for a similar app like Airbnb development to grab the market share. The main questions for these businesses are: how much does it cost to build an app like Airbnb? What are the essentials features to be integrated in the app?

In this article, we have answered both these questions perfectly.

Key features for an app similar to Airbnb

Airbnb is a two-way marketplace- one for travellers, and second for the hosts. The required features will be developed on the basis of both the marketplaces.

Sign up & log in (both travelers & hosts)
New users should be able to register their accounts with an email address, phone number, or Gmail account. Once registered, there should be a direct option for logging in.

Account management (both travelers & hosts)
Users should be able to update their account details, like the photo, email, contact number, date of birth, address, as well as password.

Messaging and notifications (both travelers & hosts)
There should be chatting features so that the traveler can message the host, and receive instant replies and notifications, and vice versa.

Search (travelers)
This is a must-include feature, enabling a seamless customer experience. Users should be able to type in the places, dates, pricing, etc. in a search bar and find the required results.

Save for later (travelers)
While browsing the hotels, experiences, or homes, the users should be able to wishlist or save these for later.

Payment methods (travelers)
Integrate multiple payment methods and currencies, allowing users to pay with the option of their preference. You can also enable discounts with coupons.

Booking history (both travelers & hosts)
Allow users to check their past, recent, or upcoming bookings.

Maps (travelers)
Integrate maps to allow users to check location, distance, nearby places, etc.

Reviews (both travelers & hosts)
Travelers should be able to rate their experience and post the review. Whereas, hosts should also be able to rate the travelers.

Support (both travelers & hosts)
Include an FAQ section, along with an option to seek support if they get stuck somewhere.

Requests (hosts)
Allow hosts to accept or decline the travel requests.

Share
Integrate a sharing button that enables users to refer the app to others.

Total cost to develop an app like Airbnb

App like-Airbnb development cost will depend on several factors, like whether you want it for Android or iOS, or both, design, team, features, technologies used, etc.

Let’s consider $50 per hour as the average cost per hour for the project. Following is a break-up of the cost on the basis of key factors:

Planning: Nearly 25 hours
API implementation: Nearly 25 hours
Database setup: 12 hours
Sign-up feature: 12 hours
Account management feature: 24 hours
Filter feature (whether to register as a traveler or host): 24 hours
Details: It will take around 180 hours to set up all the details related to rooms, photos, reviews, ratings, specifications, maps, pricing, and terms of service.
Sharing feature for referral: 24 hours
Save for later feature: 10 hours
Multilingual feature: 4 hours
Recommended places and locations: 10 hours
Navigation: 15 hours
Messaging feature: nearly 35 hours
Host settings: Around 100 hours
Backend development: Around 600 hours
Other services: 20 hours

It will take a total of nearly 1120 hours to complete the project. With $50 per hour, the total cost of an app like Airbnb will be around $56,000.

Wrapping up:

The features mentioned above are crucial to be integrated into an app like Airbnb. While the cost is a bit high compared to other businesses, it has the potential to generate a revenue of around $900 million per year. Also, remember that the cost may be slightly lesser or more, depending on the experience of mobile app developers hired and the technologies used.

5 Reasons Why SEO is Important for your Website

Do you know there are billions of queries searched on Google every day?

Do you know that 85% of people research online before buying any products?

The way the world shops has changed dramatically over the years and even more so as COVID-19 hit. Now more than a brick-mortar-store, a website is needed to conduct business. That means, no matter what you are dealing in, your potential customers are searching for it online.

Everyone is certainly catching up and moving online while employing the best marketing tactics to gain an edge. It is no surprise that almost every notable marketer would swear by SEO as it is the most prominent marketing tool to drive organic traffic.

Any high-quality SEO services can tell you why it is important. Here is our take on it.

5 Reasons Why SEO is Important for your Website-

Long Term Results- You might have heard that SEO is a long term process and take months to work its magic. That is true! But, your fruits of labour will also be long term.

As a top digital marketing service, we understand that it may take 6-12 months to show any results, but if done correctly, it will yield you profits for years to come.

Key is, to not stop working on it even if it feels like it isn’t giving any results.

Cheaper than Paid Advertising- It is established that organic traffic stays longer. If you rank highly on Google for your relevant keywords, traffic will be consistent even if you stop the process for a while. In contrast to paid advertising, if your funds dry out, your traffic will also drop.

Primary Source of Traffic is Organic Search- According to BrightEdge, 53% of all website traffic constitutes organic traffic. Meaning, you can do paid advertising but, it still won’t bring you as much traffic as SEO does.

Your website will get more traffic from SEO than Social Media too. Therefore, if you properly optimise your website and perform off-page SEO regularly, then you will receive a better ROI than any other paid form of marketing.

SEO Increases Sales- With thorough and consistent SEO strategies, our high-quality SEO service will put your website on the map, which will impact the buying cycle. When your website organically ranks high, it also gains trust and credibility automatically.

Therefore, SEO will lead to an increase in lead conversion too.

SEO Increases Brand Awareness- Every potential visitor has a long way before he converts into a customer. On average, it takes seven website visits before the conversion takes place. It’s a long process. But the very fact that he visited your website is a good sign. He may not buy it but, he will remember it.

Being one of the top results on Google will bring you a lot of visitors and build your brand awareness which is beneficial for the long term.

Conclusion-

SEO has several benefits for a website. It will produce great results and will push your business to phenomenal heights only if done methodically. When it comes to marketing strategies, SEO has a long lifespan and is the best investment you can make today.

If you are someone starting it for the first time, then remember, it is a long process and a continuous one. But it is so worth it.

Are you still confused? Ask our experts providing top digital marketing services.

Speed up software testing process with Agile methodology

In the last few years, Agile methodology is getting more popular among development companies. Development teams are replacing the classic waterfall framework on Agile as it is more flexible and focused on high-quality results. According to StackOverflow Insights 2018, 85,4% of 101,5 of international companies use Agile methodology. Among the most famous companies implemented Agile are Apple, IBM, Microsoft 8 Procter & Gamble.

Agile facilitates faster product delivery and can be implemented in any activity during the development process. Software testing as one of the essential parts of development can be improved by Agile methodology too.

What is Agile methodology in software testing?
In classic waterfall methodology software testing is a one-time process. Usually, engineers provide testing after the development process. During the development process, the emergence of bugs is a common thing. But as a testing activity is a final stage in the waterfall framework, a number of bugs accumulate. These bugs affect a system or parts of a system and can cause new failures. At the end of the development stage, the number of bugs is so huge that the development team can’t cope with it. As a result, the cost of development increases as finding bugs is cheaper than fixing it.

In Agile methodology, the development process is divided into sprints, and software testing is a part of each one. Thus software testing is provided during the whole long development process and is a simultaneous and continuous activity with the writing of code. Such an approach allows teams to get quick feedback and tightly cooperates with the development team that increases the quality of workflow.

Agile testing is flexible and adaptable, thus teams can make changes due to new requirements, strategy, etc. When the waterfall approach follows a strict order and changes in a workflow are impossible.

High competition and drastic market-changing forces companies to deliver products fast. Companies that don’t adapt to conditions have a risk of going bust or lose clients.

Study shows that projects with an Agile methodology are 28% more successful than projects with a classic framework. Such efficiency is based on the core principles of the methodology. Testing as a part of the Agile development lifecycle has principles that help to deliver faster and efficiently. These keys principles as:

continuous testing when testing is alongside the process of development.
adaptivity and flexibility to clients’ requirements.
the engaging whole team into the development process from developers to the business department.
testing is provided early and often
eliminating failures as they are identified
ongoing feedback from a team
covering all software testing levels and kinds of testing.
less documentation but more collaboration with team members.

Ways improve the testing process in Agile
Nevertheless, companies can face a lot of problems during Agile testing. Professionals have many methods to improve Agile testing. However, these approaches need to involve not only testers but the overall development team.

Arrange the Test Cycle Process. Usually, testing activity is provided by testers at the end of each sprint. But for quickly identifying failures, the team should provide tests as frequently as they can. The perfect decision is to build and test code every day. For the best results, the development team can implement continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes and combine it with automation testing. This practice helps to reveal failures early and eliminate them before releases.
Use deployment tools for testers. Testers’ teams frequently face problems associated with code deployment in the test environment. After analyzing the situation, you can create deployment tools for testers to check code changes. As an example, one project used Slack and Git for these goals. Developers created Slackbot that was connected with Git and deployment scripts. This improved collaboration between testing and development departments and reduced time for testing. Testers got Slackbot ping with code changes and deployed it in the test environment independently, without asking developers.
Implement the Test Driven Development method. The main goal of TDD is to make code clean and simple. Testers create test cases for every system function. In case if code fails tests, developers write new to pass testing. Another similar method is Acceptance test-driven development. Tests are created in collaboration with three parts — client, product owner, business analyst. Thus the team can better understand requirements and ensure better product quality. These two approaches help companies build test strategy with strict requirements on the early stage development lifecycle. Teams can avoid conflicts with clients and emphasize only important system functions.

WooCommerce Plugin Is the Best Online Shopping store

WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It makes creating and managing an online store simple, with reasonable levels of flexibility and several vital features such as inventory and tax management, secure payments, and shipping integration.

WooCommerce is the most popular and arguably best eCommerce plugin for WordPress, and its integration allows you to include both great SEO value and eCommerce ability.

Woocommerce Pricing
When a new retailer is choosing a platform, price is likely to be a major factor. eCommerce applications range from free to many thousands of dollars per year, but that difference in price isn’t necessarily related to the capability of the application.

WooCommerce is competitive with leading enterprise eCommerce applications, but because it’s free, any business or entrepreneur can take advantage of its capabilities without having to commit to expensive support contracts or proprietary software licenses.

You should note that certain third-party payment applications and other extensions may cost money, but this will not be directed to WooCommerce themselves.

WooCommerce Is Modular
Just like WordPress, WooCommerce includes a rich set of features that can be extended with the addition of plugins. Retailers who use WooCommerce benefit twice from this modularity: they have access to thousands of WordPress plugins and themes as well as hundreds of eCommerce-specific extensions built just for WooCommerce.

The genius of a modular system is that it helps to cultivate a community of developers who build extensions to add specific functionality, something that isn’t possible with monolithic applications. With the right plugins, WooCommerce can be the perfect eCommerce platform for every retailer.

Those plugins may expand functionality in regards to shipping, payments, how products are handled, and more. WooCommerce themselves have developed and recommend several additional plugins when using their store.

WooCommerce Is WordPress
“But isn’t WooCommerce just WordPress?”.

The implication being that because WooCommerce is constrained by its parent application, it can’t be as good as a purpose-built eCommerce application.

In reality, WooCommerce’s origin as aWordPress plugin is actually a strength. WordPress is hugely popular because it’s so flexible and functional. Millions of businesses choose to use WordPress because it provides the best foundation for their sites. It’s fast, secure, and easy to use.

WooCommerce inherits all of the strength and reliability of WordPress and uses it to build a world-class eCommerce experience for retailers and their customers.

WooCommerce Can Be Used To Sell Anything
WooCommerce is incredibly flexible. If you want to sell something, you can sell it with WooCommerce. That includes physical products, digital products, subscriptions, appointments, and much more. Whether you intend to sell a single digital product or an enormous variety of physical products, WooCommerce is the Swiss Army Knife of eCommerce applications.

WooCommerce Has A Vibrant Developer Community
Both WooCommerce and WordPress are open source, which means that retailers are free to change or add core features, build new extensions, and create custom themes. For some less popular eCommerce applications, it is difficult to find developers capable of doing that work and if you can find a developer, they are expensive to hire.

WooCommerce retailers benefit from a large pool of developers and WooCommerce professionals. If you need to make changes to yourWooCommerce store, it won’t be hard to find someone to do the work for you.

WooCommerce Includes Powerful Analytics
The more you know about your customers and the way they interact with your store and its products, the better. Out of the box, WooCommerce provides an extensive set of analytics displayed in a clear and intuitive interface. Additionally, it’s straightforward to integrate WooCommerce with external analytics services like Google Analytics with extensions.

WooCommerce Grows With Your Business
When choosing an eCommerce application, it is a good idea to think about the future of your business. It might be small now, but in time it will grow and you should choose an application that is capable of supporting a busy store without imposing too much complexity in the early days.

WooCommerce supports stores ranging from the tiny to the immense. It can scale from a few products to many thousands and from a handful of shoppers a day to hundreds of shoppers per second.

WooCommerce Provides World-Class Content Management
As you might expect from an eCommerce application based on the world’s most popular content management system, WooCommerce is no slouch where content is concerned.

Content is an important component of eCommerce marketing, sales optimization, and search engine optimization. Together WordPress and WooCommerce offer a wide variety of content management options, including blogging, landing pages, email marketing, and product descriptions. WooCommerce-compatible SEO plugins like Yoast WooCommerce SEO make it easy for retailers to optimize content for search.

WooCommerce Is Fast
WordPress and WooCommerce can provide a fast and responsive eCommerce experience for online stores of all sizes.

WooCommerce should be combined with performance-optimized WooCommerce hosting that is specifically engineered to maximize performance. Standard web hosting is capable of supporting WooCommerce, but it cannot provide the highly optimized PHP, MySQL, server, and network environments necessary for a responsive low-latency eCommerce experience.

WooCommerce Is Made For Selling
WooCommerce is designed for selling and it includes everything a new eCommerce retailer needs to get up and running:

Over 100 payment gateways that can be easily integrated with your store.
Multiple shipping methods with configurable shipping zones and shipping classes.
An intuitive backend for stock management, refunds, order management, email management, and everything else you need to efficiently manage your eCommerce store.
Choose from thousands of configurable and mobile-friendly free and premium WooCommerce themes or build a custom theme to give your store a unique look.
World-class documentation that provides guidance for new eCommerce retailers that need to get up-and-running.
Why Choose WooCommerce?
In short, because WooCommerce provides a complete eCommerce solution that is fast, easy to use, and can adapt to the needs of youreCommerce website for business.