6 Reasons why your eCommerce website needs a mobile app

Last black Friday sale by Daraz.pk, the biggest shopping portal in Pakistan made roughly US$ 30Million in sales. That’s a big sale day. But here’s the important bit from that article.

Over 76% of those sales were through their mobile app.

3 quarters of those sales were achieved through mobile apps for Android and iPhone. This just shows that targeted mobile apps that tie-in nicely to their eCommerce website are the way to go. Same is the case with Amazon.com. Same is the case with Souq.com (Bought by Amazon itself last year).

Your website maybe doing great and kudos on that. But you can reach bigger heights with eCommerce mobile app. We discuss the reasons why this can be an opportunity for you.

1. Brand Value

Biggest reason is of course the brand itself. If your eCommerce brand works then more than likely your apps will work too. You have to focus your brand strategy around it. Promote your app through your eCommerce website and promote your eCommerce website through your app. They all should tie-in together. Customer should feel the brand taking care of her when shopping through each medium. Similarly, a good app will increase value of the brand itself and become an asset.

2. Faster Checkout

Thing with app is, customer don’t have to checkout right away. She can do that in any coming day or week. Mobile app is not going to log him out anytime soon. That’s how they are designed. Make sure to keep user logged in for longer. User can come back and complete his checkout. Plus with Apple Pay and Google Pay, the payment solution is in the same device that is used for shopping so faster switching and hence more chance of sale completion. Faster checkout and lower abandoned cart will be sweet music to any eCommerce website owner. If the user forgot about his checkout, you can always nudge him towards checkout by …

Read more: 7 Steps to enhance eCommerce websites after launch

3. Push Notifications

Push notifications is something that web has tried to catch on by using browser notifications. But seriously its a terrible idea. I would recommend to not use it at all in your website. Nobody allows that ever. But in apps, push notifications are much more likely to be read and acted upon. eCommerce apps can receive push notifications for promotions, sales, upcoming events, flash sales, abandoned carts and many more. With latest mobile operating systems, you can send very sophisticated push notifications. The customers can even be made to go straight to checkout from the push notification. That is a very fast way to achieve a sale.

4. Better Targeting

With mobile app, the site owner has more data to play with. He can put in campaigns, newsletters, push notifications that specifically target that subset of users. He can launch sales app-only sales which is a very common ploy where apps offer 10% discount on checkout. You can offer better rates for loyal customers. You can target people who made a sale and then went away. You now have two sets of data. With Business Intelligence and big data analysis, you can target all kinds of subsets and cross patterns. This is a very interesting data to play with for a business owner. Like which city users bought from which category mostly or which item sold better with mobile and which one with web. That can help open new venues of sales.

5. Better Experience

Apps offer better experience to the end user. She can customize the display based on what her favorite categories and products are. She can hide the data that doesnt suit her experience. This will make the user come again to the app for reference and shopping. All these points depend on if the app provides the feature. We develop eCommerce apps that can provide these and more features.

6. Offline Support

Apps can provide offline support. User can save products as bookmarks. She can do her research. She can compare prices based on barcode in real life. She can save images and upload to search for them in online database and more. It just opens up more channels for your brand.

If you have more reasons then do share with us. We develop eCommerce apps for iOS and Android. You can discuss your brand with us.

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