7 Key Advantages of Ecommerce Mobile Apps For Your Online Store

It’s no secret that we’re living in a mobile-first world. In the first quarter of 2021, mobile accounted for 54.8% of global web traffic according to Statista. 

As of April 2021, 85% of Americans owned a smartphone, and 97% owned a cell phone of some kind. Nowadays, people aren’t just using mobile devices to make phone calls and send text messages to friends. We can also use them to do our weekly grocery shopping, manage our bank accounts, and so much more. 

If you own an ecommerce business and you don’t currently have a mobile app for your online store, you’re missing out on a whole demographic of customers that prefer mobile shopping. Whether you’re an ecommerce business selling clothes, electronics, cosmetics, or anything else, you can benefit from a mobile app.

In this article, we look at the top seven advantages of having an ecommerce mobile app for your business.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

7 Key business advantages of mobile ecommerce apps

Here are a few of the top ways a mobile ecommerce app can add value to your business.

1. Improved conversion rates

Mobile ecommerce applications yield higher conversion rates than mobile websites. Because of the user-friendly nature and convenience that mobile apps offer, people can make a purchase in just a few clicks. This seamless experience is what encourages customers to purchase. 

Features like push notifications, wish lists, and product filtering and sorting can all help to create a seamless shopping experience. Moreover, mobile apps can save all your information and payment details for easy checkout. These features streamline the customer journey, making mobile ecommerce apps a more convenient option for customers.

If you want your ecommerce mobile app to be high-converting, be sure to implement split testing and testing in production during the development process. This’ll help you highlight any issues with the user experience of your app, so you can address them before they deter your potential customers. 

2. Brand recognition

Mobile apps are a constant presence in smartphones of users. That means that whenever they open their phone and see your app logo, they’ll be reminded of your brand and more likely to choose it out of convenience when they need to buy something new. 

Customers are more likely to write reviews on mobile apps as it’s more easily accessible than logging onto a desktop, navigating to the website, and typing out a review. Reviews are a great way to enhance your online visibility, define your brand identity, and attract new customers. 

But it’s not enough to simply have a mobile app for your business. The app must offer a seamless user experience and user-friendly UI/UX designs to ensure customers want to keep coming back to your brand. This requires you to carry out regular crowd testing on your mobile app to ensure it functions perfectly and offers a smooth, user-friendly experience. 

3. Increased customer loyalty

Mobile apps play an integral role in a customer’s opinion of your brand. A great mobile app allows customers to have a brand’s product catalog and their personal shopping cart at their fingertips. This helps build rapport with your customers and, in turn, makes them come back for more because of their experience with your mobile app. What does this produce in the long run? Loyal customers.

Most people have their smartphones with them throughout the day. This means there’s way more opportunity to browse your store and make a purchase while they’re relaxing at home, taking public transport, or waiting for their morning coffee to brew. When your app is already on their phone, they’re more likely to open it up out of habit or convenience, rather than looking for other options. 

Since customers spend most of their time on their phones, make sure that your website is fully optimized for mobile devices. It should provide the same product details, social proof or reviews from loyal users, your contact information, and if possible a live chat or a chatbot. This way, they have all the information they need to motivate them towards making a purchase decision.

By implementing the right customer loyalty and retention strategies, you’ll be able to impress customers, demonstrate brand value, and keep them coming back for more. Also consider creating loyalty programs that include discounts, special offers, or exclusive access to new products or collections. You should also personalize their shopping experience, but more on that in the next section.

4. Provide a personalized shopping experience

Consumer expectations have changed. Nowadays, customers expect their experience with a brand to be personalized throughout their journey, whether on mobile or desktop. One survey found that 91% of consumers say they’re more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them. 

The process of a personalized shopping experience does not only require you to build mobile app functionality into your ecommerce store. Beyond this, you can also collect valuable insights about your audience and how they interact with your brand and online store. 

Armed with these insights, you can personalize their shopping experience with product recommendations based on their likes and purchase history, personalized cart-abandonment emails, personalized marketing campaigns, push notifications, and more. 

This way, rather than sending general notifications or campaigns, you can personalize them to the user, which helps to build relationships and encourage them to come back to your store. 

Personalization is the key to building strong customer relationships in the modern business landscape. Consumers don’t want to be treated like numbers that add up towards your total revenue, they want brands to appeal to their human side. That means sharing personalized content that’s tailored to their needs, not those of the general public. 

5. Better efficiency

Mobile apps allow your customers to shop more conveniently, but it can also increase operational efficiency for your business and the team running it. A highly-optimized app with robust features and a user-friendly interface will enhance your sales and streamline the customer experience. 

Moreover, a great mobile app that’s undergone different types of software testing attracts more customers, which translates to more orders from your business. Mobile app features like push notifications also help guide customers to make quicker purchase decisions by constantly looping your customers back to your app whether it’s because of an abandoned shopping cart or a new promo, leading to a more efficient sales process. 

6. Improved marketing communications

Marketing plays a key role in attracting customers, nurturing them, and increasing brand awareness for your company. It’s likely you’ll already have a range of marketing strategies in place, including content marketing, performance marketing, social media marketing, and so on.

With the majority of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, your ecommerce mobile app can help you generate more leads through your PPC marketing campaigns on top of other marketing tactics. Moreover, if your business is interested in running the best affiliate programs possible, you’ll be able to attract more customers through the mobile traffic they generate. 

Another way having a mobile app can drive more traffic is through forming partnerships with brand ambassadors. But what is brand ambassador marketing? It’s a marketing technique where you partner with influencers or other spokespeople who are passionate about your brand. They help to drive traffic to your website by promoting your products on their social media pages or blogs. And where do most people access social media? You got it—on mobile!

This is also relevant to your social media marketing campaigns. More than 4.55 billion people around the world are active on social media, and the majority of them access it on mobile. 

So if people see your posts or ads on social media while they’re browsing on your phone, and you can link your socials to a mobile app, it’s more likely they’ll convert than if you just have a mobile website. In fact, mobile apps are used 7x more than web browsers!!

7. Offer multiple payment options

t’s true that websites facilitate online payment options, but mobile apps take it to a whole new level of convenience. Customers can pay with the tap of a button using third-party payment apps like Google Pay and Apple Pay. They can also use their regular debit cards, Ewallets, or online payment methods like Paypal.

With a mobile app, shopping online is super easy, and as payment details can be saved to their account, customers don’t have to go through the process of inputting it every time they checkout. Moreover, they can shop from anywhere on the go, which means they don’t have to have their laptop in front of them. 

You can start by selecting a suitable third-party payment gateway for your online store and ensure it fits with your current integrations. Ewallets are on the rise nowadays and it’s a good move for your brand to be able to keep up with the demand by offering multiple, but reliable and safe, payment options.

 

Get ahead with a mobile ecommerce app for your online store

As an increasing number of people unlock their mobile phones to shop online, having a mobile app that offers an efficient and effective user experience is crucial to business success in the modern digital landscape. 

As you’ve seen in this article, there are numerous benefits to offering your customers a mobile app. Not only does it improve their customer experience with your brand, it also directly translates into more sales and increased revenue. Although developing a mobile app will take some initial investment, it’ll definitely pay off in the end. 

Remember to incorporate business app metrics to continuously track and improve the performance of your app, and stay on top of industry trends and shifts in consumer behavior to ensure you’re always providing the best possible experience for your customers. 

Author

Kate Priestman – Head Of Marketing, Global App Testing

Kate Priestman is the Head of Marketing at Global App Testing, a trusted and leading end-to-end functional app testing solution for QA challenges. Kate has over 8 years of experience in the field of marketing, helping brands achieve exceptional growth. She has extensive knowledge on brand development, lead and demand generation, and marketing strategy — driving business impact at its best. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.