How Mobile Applications are Driving Ecommerce Growth

Posted by Ciaran

There can be hardly any doubt that mobile apps continue to play a dominant and decisive role in shaping businesses' success across the niches and around the world.

While most users in all walks of life remain strongly addicted to apps, ecommerce and online stores can hardly remain left out of touch from this trend. This is why ecommerce is fast turning into mobile commerce, thanks to the web stores turning into native mobile store apps.

Are you looking to hire remote developers to build your ecommerce app? Well, before that, you need to know the key features and advantages that make mobile ecommerce apps so popular over traditional web stores. Here throughout this blog post, we will explain the roles of mobile apps in driving ecommerce growth.

Why Do Users and Businesses Prefer Mobile Apps Over Mobile Websites?

Thanks to the rise of mobile apps for ecommerce, the traditional web stores have taken a backseat in terms of pleasing shopping experiences and business conversion. Mobile ecommerce apps are top-rated over the traditional web stores because of the sophisticated native shopping experience, ease of shopping and the ability to keep in touch continuously.

Ecommerce stores are also fast embracing mobile apps for a range of benefits like higher business conversion, a better branding opportunity, informed decision making and creating a loyal customer base.

Here we explain why shoppers and ecommerce stores prefer mobile ecommerce apps over the web.

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Photo credit: Mohamed Hassan

The Smart Shopping Experience

Thanks to the advanced technologies used in today's ecommerce store apps across the niches, customers can avail of a sophisticated, smart and highly personalised shopping experience, unlike the traditional web stores. Here are some ways mobile ecommerce apps are delivering smart and engaging shopping experiences.

  • Faster loading speed and all-day accessibility is a significant advantage of the native ecommerce apps.
  • Smooth integration with device features to ensure a smooth user experience.
  • Easy authentication with native features such as fingerprint and face recognition technologies.
  • Integrated mobile AR and VR technology to allow smart interactions and a sophisticated shopping experience.
  • Intelligent product search algorithms were ensuring faster and more context-aware results against every customer search.
  • Intelligent chatbots to offer real-time guidance on product searches and purchases.
  • Integrated mobile wallet and QR scanners to process faster payment, whether for online or omnichannel purchases.

Awesome Scope of Personalisation

All the smart features that we mentioned above for modern ecommerce mobile apps also help in personalising the shopping experience to a great extent. While the traditional desktop web was limited to a typical "one size fits all" kind of shopping experience, the mobile app-based shopping experience is open to unmatched scope of personalisation. Here below, we mention some personalisation benefits of mobile ecommerce apps.

  • Mobile commerce apps by utilising intelligent machine learning technologies can help customers access products and search results based on their preferences and constraints.
  • Intelligent AI and machine learning-powered chatbots can initiate highly personalised communication based upon in-app user behaviour, location and context-based inputs and customer history.
  • Mobile ecommerce apps can also send personalised messages, notifications and emails based on customer behaviour, purchase history, GPS location and contexts.
  • Incentivising customer communication becomes easier by sending notifications loaded with instantly converting QR code or coupon link or payment gateway link.
  • Mobile commerce apps, by utilising the user behaviour, device data and location data, can get more accurate data-driven insights about users and send useful notifications more easily.

More Informed Decision Making

Thanks to mobile ecommerce apps, online stores now can come with more informed decisions based on more precise data-driven insights. Since mobile devices engage the audience all day long, the footprints of user interactions across multiple apps feed the analytics engine with a lot of relevant data-driven insights in user behaviour, preferences, constraints and pain points in different contexts and situations.

Such granular level data analytics help mobile ecommerce apps better understand user contexts, buying behaviour, and online interactions. Naturally, with an always accessible mobile app, they can know their customers better and drive more interactions.

Branding Opportunities and Creating a Loyal Customer Base

Mobile apps are fantastic tools for branding. Since apps are more specifically addressed to the customer needs with a lot of scope for personalisation and easy shopping, they create a better brand presence.

Mobile apps are weighed by the customers on account of the shopping experience, and hence even a small business brand can compete with a big one just by offering a unique and sophisticated mobile shopping experience. This level playing field created by the mobile ecommerce apps has helped many brands achieve quick traction.

Creating a loyal customer base that can stay connected with the ecommerce app all day long is another great advantage of mobile ecommerce apps. Customers, by only staying connected with the app through push notifications, can be more engaged, and the result can be visible with the enhanced business conversion. The offline access to the app content is another crucial advantage that ensures higher footfall and customer interactions.

Using the Mobile Ecommerce App for Omnichannel Marketing

These days many physical stores also build their mobile ecommerce apps to take advantage of this as a powerful marketing channel converting business both online and offline.

Having a mobile commerce app, a business can quickly build a subscriber list that can be used for digital marketing campaigns. The app allowing the company to access customer email addresses can launch email marketing campaigns to boost traction and engagement.

Mobile apps can also allow physical stores to engage their loyal customers and reach out to customers through mobile push notifications. Push notifications are successful because they enjoy a higher reading rate. Mobile messages sent to customers based on their geolocation data and context can also help so-called physical stores to boost traction and business conversion.

Conclusion

With so many advantages, mobile ecommerce apps are quite likely to hold the key to the future of ecommerce and retail businesses as a whole. But it is how unique, engaging and intuitive shopping experience you can offer to your customer's matters most.