eCommerce apps no longer represent an alternative business avenue or a choice among the multitude of ways to generate sales. With the global population increasingly tending to online and mobile purchases, no business can look wayward from this. Fortunately, most businesses now understand the importance of e-commerce apps and are slowly crowding the eCommerce development space with their online stores.
But just having an online presence with a responsively designed or a mobile-optimized e-commerce website is not enough. Customers now prefer a more personalized shopping experience and connection with the brands. Customers prefer native user experience even while shopping. They want to get notified about the latest value offerings and deals, they want offline access to their shopping carts to make changes when the internet is not working and most important of all, they want their stores to load instantly. All such user experience attributes are only delivered by mobile e-commerce apps and not their web counterparts.
If these findings are still not convincing enough, let’s get down to some useful statistics. According to the Pew research, every 8 out of 10 US citizens shop online and the vast majority of them shop using their mobile devices. This is why any e-commerce business without having a mobile app is actually missing out on considerable traffic and sales.
You have made a start in the e-commerce space with a responsive e-commerce website and that’s perfect for a beginner. But gradually after consolidating your brand presence you need to move on to a native mobile app to retain your customers and catch on new traffic and business conversion opportunities. Let us now explain some of the most credible reasons for e-commerce businesses to build their own e-commerce apps.
Easy And Engaging Shopping Experience
When your online store is accessible through a responsive website, each time the buyer visits the store the browser will come with a fresh prompt requiring the user to provide login details and continue shopping. In contrast, with the mobile commerce apps, the login details and credentials including the device information are shared and validated only once and without an exceptional reason, the users can easily visit, make purchases and stay logged in all the time.
Some e-commerce apps even make it further easier by authenticating the device based biometric data such as fingerprints. Just because the users don’t need to access the store through browsers and use login details for making every purchase, it ensures easy access and a delightful native shopping experience.
Integrated Native Device Features
The native features and capabilities of the smartphone devices help deliver an improved user experience. The inbuilt smartphone features and device components such as GPS and cameras ensure providing optimum user experience. From uploading images for image search functions to detecting user locations for location-aware alerts, integrated device features and functions ensure a highly interactive shopping experience.
Another native device capability that ensures better shopping experience is offline use and offline access to content. Thanks to local and device-level data caching, the phone can display shopping carts and already cached data. While the buyers can still interact offline, the interactions will only be updated when the connection is restored. Offline access to content ensures more buyer engagement and business conversion for e-commerce apps.
E-commerce Apps As Marketing Channels
E-commerce mobile apps can also be utilized by retail brands as a unified omnichannel marketing platform by retailers. to the customers. Apps allowing social media integration bringing together multiple ways of engaging customers make marketing of content easier. The same e-commerce app can allow offline customers to stay updated on products, give orders online and collect products offline, redeeming store purchase coupons through mobile apps, etc.
By using geofencing and Beacons technologies powered by push notifications mobile e-commerce apps can send promotional messages and offers to the customers as and when they are in close proximity to a store or passing nearby. Such location-aware marketing techniques by using e-commerce apps can open new opportunities for business conversion.
Easy And Streamlined Checkout And Payment
For most e-commerce stores the biggest concern is the increasing rate of shopping cart abandonment. Most online retail businesses experience an increased rate of abandoned carts. The cart abandonment mostly occurs due to the poor checkout experience and slower and non-reliable payment processing. This is where the native eCommerce apps come to the rescue.
Mobile e-commerce apps tend to offer a more interactive and iterative shopping experience. The checkout process across mobile e-commerce stores seem to be highly streamlined, integrated, and frictionless. Since the device can locally store a lot of user information, filling out the forms and choosing the options are done almost effortlessly. As for making quick payments, the integrated mobile wallets provide a more secure and streamlined method.
Immersive Shopping Experience
Mobile e-commerce apps often go hand in hand with modern AR and VR technologies. Mobile eCommerce apps by using these immersive technologies can provide a fluid shopping experience to the customers. The augmented reality integrated into smartphone apps allows scanning the product tags in physical stores and being informed about them in real-time. The VR helps evaluate the product fitting and the look and feel remote right on the mobile screen.
Intelligent Chatbots
Finally, it is the intelligent chatbots that are making mobile e-commerce stores more interactive and intuitive. The e-commerce chatbots powered by artificial intelligence can make precise product recommendations based on the purchase and browsing history. The chatbots from guiding new visitors to find they’re needful to promote products and deals, in multiple ways can transform the mobile shopping experience.
Conclusion
All these reasons that we discussed above are pretty obvious to make mobile shopping and mobile e-commerce popular. With the increasing footprints of mobile e-commerce brands, it seems that the future of online retail depends on the mobile apps.
Author Bio: Manev Dave is the senior developer at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading WooCommerce Development Services Company with 8+ years of experience. He loves to write about eCommerce technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and business. His creative abilities, academic track record, and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well.