Benefits of Developing Mobile Apps for E-Commerce Stores
Mobile commerce is growing exponentially these days. If you want to build a successful trading enterprise and focus on attracting customers and increasing sales, the importance of having mobile e-Commerce solutions should be obvious. Actually, there are numerous reasons why you should have a mobile solution for your webshop. We’ve picked out the four most important benefits of e-Commerce apps for your business.
1. Loyal Customers
Although a mobile app is a copy of the existing website, it is highly optimized, personalized and well-designed, which significantly improves customer experience and facilitates the acquisition and retention of new clients. They find themselves in a convenient online store where they can choose goods and purchase them without the hustle and bustle.
Here are some important advantages of a mobile shopping app over a responsive website:
- Mobility. Consumers get more freedom while using applications anytime and from any place.
- Loading time. Application pages load faster, therefore, they reel in more clients. Managers should realize that in the retail business, seconds count. Most visitors will leave the site if it needs more than three seconds to load and they will likely turn to competitors.
- Personalized content. Shopping preferences and previous orders can be saved in the app, serving as the basis for personalized offerings.
- Offline access. The best e-Commerce applications can provide users with the basic functionality (to compare products, to check prices) even offline using a full-power performance of a smart device.
Thus, e-Commerce apps are able to create a solid loyal audience for your company.
2. Brand Recognition
Mobile apps support strong connections between brands and customers. For example, users willingly share links to their favorite sites, ask for feedback and describe their customer experience in social networks. You can integrate popular social media platforms into your application to let customers discuss your products and services.
These are powerful tools for building your brand’s reputation, advertising your service and drawing the attention of potential clients.
Moreover, mobile users have amazing opportunities to get push notifications with special offerings, discounts and giveaways. This means that they can save money, so from a psychological perspective, they are likely to interact with such shops on a regular basis.
3. Better Efficiency and Increased Revenues
As a rule, mobile applications are more flexible and user-friendly. Although their implementation is quite expensive, they are likely to quickly pay off and increase sales. The correlation is simple: a good app with the right concept and functionality brings more clients; more clients result in more orders, consequently, your earnings are increasing.
In addition, push notifications are a cheap and effective channel for increasing sales and maintaining the brand. Via push notifications, you can instantly deliver essential information to your customers and inspire them to make immediate orders.
4. Detailed Analytics
Data is easy to gather and track in the application. Mobile functionality allows you to monitor users’ interaction and gives you useful information about them, such as responsiveness to particular content and features, feedback, session length, audience composition. This may help deliver improvements and updates, create personalized content, develop an advanced marketing strategy and efficient promotional campaigns and. Do make use of mobile analytics.
5. Contactless Payments
Individual smartphones can now replace cash and credit cards due to the invention of mobile contactless payments technology. Payment apps provide ease, speed and security. At the checkout, you don’t need to get a wallet from your bag to take out coins, banknotes, or credit cards. Put the phone to the payment terminal and that’s it!
It has become especially urgent during the COVID-19 pandemic when people have to avoid touching things and try to reduce the time spent in shops.
How to Develop an E-Commerce Mobile App
Custom development of a native mobile solution for an e-Commerce business is quite a challenge. You should follow some definite steps and pay attention to lots of details in order to get the process right. Here is the guide with the main building blocks needed to plan and create your mobile solution for online trading.
Strategy
First of all, you need a strategy. Define your goals, the market you want to cover and the target audience you need to reach. This will help you imagine your future app, determine the functions the app should perform and describe your ideas to the development team.
Design
How to create a mobile app that will generate profits and make your users happy? You need a thought-out design that is both pleasing to the eye and easy to use.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Steve Jobs
Most people rely on their first impression when evaluating something. It takes a person around 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about an object and decide whether he or she likes it or not. So, the appealing layout design of a mobile app ensures a positive user experience, which significantly increases customer loyalty and speeds up the payback.