Mobile commerce has exploded in recent years. According to Statista, global e-commerce sales topped $3.5 trillion in 2021, reaching nearly 73% of total e-commerce sales. As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices for shopping, brands that don’t have a mobile e-commerce presence risk losing out on significant revenue opportunities.
With mobile poised to dominate e-commerce transactions going forward, according to all app statistics, now is the time for brands to develop and optimize their own branded mobile apps. A custom-built app provides numerous advantages over mobile websites and gives brands the best opportunity to connect with customers and drive sales on mobile.
This article will explore the top 11 reasons every e-commerce brand should invest in building their own mobile shopping app. From leveraging mobile-optimized features to owning customer data, having a branded app provides critical benefits for customer engagement, sales growth, and competitive differentiation. Read on to understand why mobile apps are becoming essential for e-commerce success.
Benefits of Owning an Ecommerce Mobile App
Today, mobile apps have become essential for ecommerce businesses to reach customers and drive sales. Owning a custom mobile app provides numerous benefits that can help your business grow. In recent times, ECommerce apps can easily be created using WooCommerce app builder tools or BetterCommerce.
Reach Customers Anytime, Anywhere
A mobile app allows you to reach customers 24/7, no matter where they are. People rely on their smartphones for most tasks, so having an app makes your business accessible at all times. This provides more opportunities for sales as customers can shop for your products or services conveniently on the go.
Provide a Seamless Shopping Experience
Well-designed mobile apps optimize the shopping experience for ease and convenience. Features like saved payment methods, easy checkout, and wish lists, remove friction from the purchasing process. This encourages higher conversion rates as customers can seamlessly browse and buy your products.
Increase Sales and Revenue
Mobile commerce accounted for over half of the e-commerce sales in recent years. Businesses with mobile apps can capitalize on this growing trend to boost revenue. Mobile apps allow you to engage users with push notifications, advertise sales or new arrivals, and make impulse purchases effortless. This mobility effect helps convert more mobile visitors into paying customers.
Build Brand Loyalty
Customers appreciate businesses that offer the flexibility and convenience of mobile apps. Providing a personalized, optimized shopping experience on mobile can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. With an app, it’s easier to re-engage users and nurture long-term relationships that benefit your brand.
Seamless Features Integrations
An ecommerce mobile app needs to have certain key features to provide users with a seamless shopping experience. Here are some of the most important features to consider including:
User Accounts
Allowing users to create accounts on your app enables you to gather important customer data and provide personalized recommendations. User accounts also let customers store payment information and shipping addresses to expedite checkout. You can send targeted push notifications to drive re-engagement.
Secure Payment Options
Your app should integrate mobile payment gateways like Apple Pay and Google Pay to provide a fast, secure checkout experience. Allowing guest checkouts is also important for customers who don’t want to create accounts. Using SSL encryption is a must for protecting sensitive customer payment data.
Product Catalogs
Well-organized, easy-to-navigate product catalogs help customers find what they want quickly. Important catalog features include category/filter options, sorting, and search. High-quality product images, titles, descriptions, reviews, and variation options (size, color, etc.) enhance discovery.
Push Notifications
Push notifications encourage re-engagement and sales. Send personalized notifications about abandoned carts, product arrivals, sales/deals, and more. Allow customers to control notification frequency and opt into different categories.
Recommendations
Recommendation engines boost sales through personalized product suggestions based on purchase history, browsing behavior, and similarity with other buyers. Recommendations give customers a more relevant, customized experience.
The world has gone mobile.
More than half of all online traffic now comes from mobile devices. An ecommerce mobile app offers the opportunity to provide an optimized shopping experience tailored specifically for phones and tablets.
Features that help optimize mobile commerce include:
- Faster load times – Mobile apps load content faster by storing it locally on the device. This eliminates the need to fetch information from the web on each visit. Apps can preload commonly accessed data to deliver instant access.
- Intuitive navigation – The layout and menus can be designed specifically for touchscreens. Important actions like search and checkout are prioritized in the interface. Swipes, taps, and other gestures provide natural ways to interact.
- Gesture controls – Instead of tiny buttons, mobile apps allow shoppers to use intuitive gestures like swiping through products or pinch-zooming on images. These create fluid and seamless experiences.
- Mobile-friendly design – The responsive UI automatically adapts to different screen sizes. Shopping flows are streamlined for mobile with focused product pages and simplified checkout. Engaging visuals keep users focused on mobile-sized displays.
With an app designed expressly for mobile usage, businesses can deliver convenient, user-friendly shopping that keeps customers coming back.
Easy Personalization
One of the key benefits of owning your own ecommerce app is the ability to provide a personalized experience for each user. Mobile apps allow you to gather data about your customers and tailor content specifically for them. Here are some of the personalization features you can leverage in your ecommerce app:
Targeted Promotions
You can offer special promotions, discounts, or product recommendations that are targeted to each user based on their interests, demographics, location, past purchases, and browsing history. Sending customized offers is more effective than generic promotions.
Location-Based Features
An app can detect the user’s location and showcase products that are popular in their city or state. You can provide location-specific recommendations, like showing winter coats to someone in a cold climate.
User Preferences
Allow customers to select their preferences like size, color, style, price range, etc., and only display products that match those criteria. Recommend items based on their favorites and past purchases.
Customized Experience
With an app, every user can have a unique home screen, product feeds, and journey based on their behavior over time. Provide a tailored experience that feels like it was designed just for them.
The ability to personalize and customize content for each user is a powerful advantage of owning your mobile ecommerce app. It leads to higher engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.
Omnichannel Experience
Having an omnichannel experience is crucial for ecommerce businesses today. An omnichannel approach provides customers with a seamless and consistent experience across all devices and platforms.
An ecommerce mobile app should integrate fully with your website and other sales channels to create a unified brand experience. Customers expect to be able to browse products, add items to their cart, and complete purchases whether they are on desktop, mobile web, mobile app, or in a brick-and-mortar store.
Key aspects of an omnichannel experience include:
- Seamless experience across devices: Customers can switch between desktop, mobile, and in-store shopping smoothly. Their account, cart, wishlist, order history, and other data is synced.
- Consistent branding: Visual design, messaging, promotions, and branding are consistent across all platforms. This builds brand recognition and trust.
- Shared shopping cart: Customers can add items to their cart on one device and complete the purchase on another device. The mobile app cart should sync with the website cart in real time.
An omnichannel approach meets customers wherever they are and provides a streamlined experience. This convenience discourages shopping cart abandonment and increases sales.
Data-Driven System for business Decisions
With a custom-built app, you have access to detailed analytics on user behavior that can provide valuable insights into your customers and your business.
An ecommerce app allows you to track metrics like:
- How users navigate through the app and what pages they spend the most time on
- Which products get viewed/added to the cart/purchased the most
- Demographic data on your users
- How users respond to sales, discounts, recommendations
- Performance of your search and filters
- Cart abandonment rates
Analyzing this data over time can uncover trends that you may miss otherwise. You may find certain product categories are gaining popularity while others decline. Monitoring analytics can also help you identify pain points in the user experience to improve.
Additionally, analytics from the app can better inform your digital marketing and ad campaigns. You can see which marketing channels drive the most conversions and target your efforts accordingly. Data shows which campaigns attract valuable users that drive revenue rather than simply installs.
With an app built in-house, you own the data and can fully leverage user analytics. This gives you a competitive edge with exclusive insights into your customers and your app’s performance.
Top Security
Having a secure ecommerce app is crucial for building trust with customers and protecting sensitive user data. There are several key security measures an ecommerce app should implement:
Encryption – All data transmitted and stored by the app should be encrypted. This includes customer profile information, order details, payment info, etc. SSL/TLS protocols should be used to encrypt data in transit between the app and servers. Other encryption methods can help secure data at rest on devices and servers.
Secure Payments – Integrating a payment gateway that uses secure methods like tokenization can help protect payment card data. No sensitive card details should be stored on the app itself. Using methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay also enhances security.
Privacy Controls – Customers should be able to control what personal data the app accesses and stores. Allowing them to opt out of data collection for ads/marketing helps build trust. Only collect necessary user data for core app functionality.
Access Controls – Employee access to admin panels/data should require strong passwords or two-factor authentication. Rate-limiting login attempts help prevent brute-force attacks. Authenticating API requests also helps prevent unauthorized access.
Code Auditing – Conducting regular audits and testing for vulnerabilities is crucial. Fixing any discovered security issues right away is important for an ecommerce app handling financial transactions and user data.
By implementing end-to-end encryption, secure payments, advanced privacy controls, strong access controls, and ongoing auditing, an ecommerce app can provide excellent security for customers. This builds loyalty and confidence in the brand for the long term.
Platform of Choice
When deciding how to build your ecommerce mobile app, you have three main options: native, hybrid, or web.
Native apps are built specifically for iOS or Android operating systems using Swift, Objective-C, Java, or Kotlin. They offer the best performance, experience, and access to device features. However, native app development requires building the app twice (for both platforms), which increases costs and time to launch.
Hybrid apps use web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript wrapped in a native container. They are easier to build with cross-platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, or Ionic. Hybrid apps are faster and cheaper to develop with some compromise on performance.
Web apps are mobile websites built with responsive design. They only need to be built once and work across all devices and platforms. Web apps have the lowest development costs and the quickest time to launch. However, they offer limited functionality compared to native or hybrid apps.
App Builders Software: Numerous app builder software allow seamless integration or easy conversation of ECommerce website to app or native integrations of a complete commerce selling systems. Software tools like Swiftspeed, Adalo, and Apphive are great examples of modern SAAS tools that are used to build e-commerce apps without writing a single line of code.
When weighing the options, consider your budget, timeline, and need for native features. Native apps provide the best user experience but cost more. Hybrid apps balance capabilities and costs. Web apps get your app to market fastest with the lowest investment. Select the approach that aligns with your business needs and resources.
Wrapping Up
Owning an ecommerce mobile app provides numerous benefits that can help propel your business to new heights. With mobile commerce continuing to grow rapidly, having a robust mobile presence is essential for connecting with customers where they are already spending much of their time – on their smartphones.
Some of the key benefits covered in this article include:
- Increased sales and revenue by making purchases frictionless for on-the-go customers
- Higher conversion rates through optimized checkout and payment flows designed for mobile
- Improved customer engagement and loyalty with app-only promotions and personalized recommendations
- Seamless omnichannel experience so customers can browse and buy across devices
- Valuable customer data and insights from analytics specific to the mobile experience
- Enhanced trust and security with native app features like biometrics and encryption
Mobile is undoubtedly the future of commerce, and brands that embrace owning their own ecommerce apps will have a competitive advantage. With a well-designed, feature-rich mobile app that delivers an excellent user experience, businesses can provide existing customers with better service while attracting new mobile-first customers into their sales funnel. The time is now to invest in a custom mobile app presence and reap the rewards.
