Have you ever wondered why your eCommerce Store is not fetching you the desired success, despite maintaining an outstanding website for attracting online buyers? The answer is simple! The market is fast progressing and adapting to novel approaches for gaining a competitive edge over peers.
Websites are a thing of the past as mobile apps have taken over! Modern-era consumers are glued to their mobile screens and prefer a mobile app for obtaining any service or product they desire. As such, today, most successful entrepreneurs boast of possessing a dedicated eCommerce mobile app for their business.
Mobile apps open up endless possibilities and elevate your business to unprecedented heights of success. This post explores the myriad goodies of mobile eCommerce apps and discusses the reasons why every eCommerce store needs a mobile app, even if they already have a responsive website.
eCommerce Mobile App Benefits: Customers’ Perspective
Rich User Interface
Mobile apps can conduct certain functions during offline mode and hence, do not require constant internet connectivity. This functionality of mobile apps facilitates the speedier loading of animations as well as high-resolution images, leading to the creation of a captivating design and a rich UX.
Effortless Sign in/Check out
Every time users log into websites, the browser prompts them to sign in to their account for continuing their shopping activity. And, this is the case even with a responsive website. Mobile apps, on the other hand, store the users’ particulars during their first sign-in. So, the users have to sign in only once — at the time of downloading the application- without the need for signing in every time they shop. This results in enhanced user satisfaction.
Owing to its simple layout, a mobile app speeds up the checkout process and enables eCommerce companies to provide consumers the option of single-click ordering.
Access to Native Features of Smartphones
Unlike websites, mobile apps can leverage the native features of the users’ smartphones like cameras, microphones, and GPS, for providing them an improved UX. For instance, GPS automatically identifies and geotags the users’ current location, the device microphone allows users to verbalize their search process, and the device’s camera enables consumers to click pictures of the purchased items and showcase these on social media platforms. Furthermore, an interactive shopping experience enabled by AR and VR is available for mobile apps only.
Easy Navigation
Using mobile apps, users can easily switch between various tabs resulting in smooth and easy-going navigation that is not possible using websites.
Responsiveness
The responsiveness of an eCommerce website/app plays a crucial role in its success. This is because modern customers have a relatively lower attention span and abandon the web or mobile apps if it loads too slowly. And, mobile apps enjoy a significant advantage over websites regarding responsiveness and the speed of content loading. Here are the reasons!
Mobile apps can perform certain basic functions like comparing a product’s features, verifying prices, etc. during the offline mode and can store a certain amount of their data on the users’ smartphone devices. Websites, contrarily, cannot function during the offline mode and require a stable uninterrupted network connection for content updates.
Therefore, the amount of data transmitted between a mobile app and a server is ten times lesser than the data transferred between a web browser and a server. As a result, mobile apps receive data much faster as compared to websites and hence, take lesser time to respond. For this reason, mobile apps are more responsive than websites and promise speedier content loading.
Ability to set User Preferences
A mobile eCommerce application allows users to activate app filters and set their preferences while they are searching for a specific product or service so that the app displays only the types of products/services they are looking for. Moreover, the users can shortlist the desired products and save them in the form of a wishlist. This feature saves the users’ time and effort as they do not have to search for the product all over again during their next online store visit.
Hassle-free payment and Timely Notifications
Mobile app users can select from various payment options/methodologies and can even add a card of their choice for speeding up transactions.
Besides, business brands use mobile apps to notify their customers about lucrative deals, special discounts, or information about when a particular item in the users’ wish list comes back in stock.
eCommerce Mobile App: Business Benefits
Direct Marketing Channel for Branding
A mobile application allows brands to offer an integrated omnichannel experience to consumers by:
- Integrating social media channels with the app for maximizing customer engagement
- Utilizing the information about customer preferences saved by the app, for sending tailored content relevant to a specific customer
- Making use of geofencing and displaying special offers on the customers’ smartphones via push notifications, whenever they are within close proximity to the physical store of the brand.
High-end Services to Customers
eCommerce apps enable business owners to provide extraordinary services to their consumers in the following ways:
- Real-time in-app 24X7 customer support via an in-built help desk for resolving complaints and queries
- Personalized shopping recommendations to each customer based on their browser/ purchase history
- Innovative functionalities to enrich the shopping experience of users
- Adding features to boost the app usability by integrating third-party APIs
Improved Customer Loyalty
Users can hardly recall URLs of websites, but always remember their favorite mobile apps as apps allow them the convenience to access all products/services offered by a brand with a few clicks. Therefore, it is a crucial tool for building customer loyalty.
The commonest strategy to create customer loyalty using mobile apps is running an in-app loyalty program for existing customers by providing them with special discounted offers, reward points, etc. Users can be offered:
- A points pattern that can be redeemed for winning a free product
- Bonus on future purchases
- First access to a season’s new collection
Lower Cart Abandonment Rates
It has been observed that a majority of eCommerce businesses suffer due to cart abandonment rates and this rate is higher for eCommerce websites.
Key reasons for cart abandonment are:
- A complex and time-consuming checkout/payment process
- Additional costs like taxes, shipping charges, etc.
- Website crashes, errors, and other such issues
- Lack of trust while furnishing credit card information to the website
However, mobile apps successfully address all these issues by providing customized settings, effortless navigation, faster loading of pages, and reduced friction while checking out. Moreover, due to the practice of saving consumers’ preferences within the app settings after their first purchase, customers do not have to manually enter details like their names, shipping address, billing information, etc. during their future purchases. Furthermore, consumers can choose from multiple secure payment gateways like Google Pay, Paypal, Apple Pay, etc. and the entire process of buying products is executed with the help of a few clicks. Some apps even provide the facility of making a purchase by simply scanning the users’ fingerprints.
Handy Insights on Consumer Behavior
Mobile analytics can be utilized to track and monitor the users’ interaction with your app. Moreover, mobile apps can be integrated with cutting-edge technologies such as Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. These practices help entrepreneurs gather valuable data on user behavior and their purchasing patterns like as given below:
- What are the likes, dislikes, and preferences of consumers while shopping?
- At what time, during the day, do they usually make purchase decisions?
- How much time do they take to finalize a purchase decision?
- How do users respond to particular content and its functionalities?
- What is the users’ feedback about a brand’s products/services?
Once the brand owners get the answers to the aforesaid questions, they can adopt profitable strategies for accelerating sales — creating customized content for users, implementing improvements and updates based on user feedback, and building more effective promotional/marketing campaigns.
Increased Revenue Generation
Needless to say, mobile apps are more flexible and consumer-friendly as compared to websites. So, despite the fact that implementing apps involve a huge cost; they guarantee a handsome ROI. The reason is a mobile app with the relevant concept and the right set of features attracts more consumers, resulting in increased sales, and hence, a greater amount of revenue is generated. Besides, push notifications allow brands to deliver the necessary information to consumers, thereby encouraging them to make instant purchases.
Concluding Words:
Thus, to sum up, a mobile app is an essential tool for the growth and success of any eCommerce business. eCommerce mobile applications help a business brand to make its online presence felt, generate a positive brand image, provide incredible services, and maximize sales.
If you are looking for an experienced and proficient eCommerce app development company or services, reach out to Biz4Solutions, an offshore mobile app development company in India and U.S.A. We have 10+years of experience in delivering top-quality eCommerce solutions for global clients.
To know more about our core technologies, refer to links below:
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