Ecommerce Mobile Apps: All you need to know before you start

19 Sep 2016 ByAliona Surovtseva InE-commerce

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30% of all online shopping purchases now happen on mobile phones, which is kicked around alongside with the fact that these figures are skyrocketing right along. According to TIME magazine, Americans check their smartphones 8 billion times a day. What is it all about in terms of a particular business?

90% of 1 million mobile users – your potential customers – perform searches on mobile devices and 92% of those who searched on their phone made a related purchase.
Almost half of the market (at this very stage alone) is out of your reach once you fail to provide a mobile version of your website, an adaptive layout or a mobile app
Apps deliver 2x the new user retention power. Higher retention means a better chance at creating lifetime consumers.
According to Statista projected number of mobile app downloads worldwide by 2017 will be 268,692m times.
Unless you keep up disregarding mobile traffic, these users might become the ones to foster the upsurge in your sales

But is it really worth spending a fortune on Ecommerce Mobile Apps rather than on an adaptive layout? Is a mobile application smart enough to handle tasks of your Ecommerce project and what actually could be managed through it? What are those Ecommerce niches that are best suited for Mobile traffic? Entrapped in all these questions and clueless whether you belong here? To help you get to the bottom of the issue, we shall show you the ropes and give full particulars of how to drill deeper, find out whatever you need and which way to go.

Mobile traffic is at present a sort of labyrinth leading marketers astray. You are kinda conscious of the urgency of dealing with it somehow, as well as you are kinda aware of the risk of being far more than one step behind the competition in case you overlook this trend. Nonetheless, the herd instinct doesn’t do any good to your business. It’s one thing to know it, another one to understand it and yet a far more difficult one to do it. Furthermore, it’s few who do know how to handle ‘offline-online’ combination, let alone the puzzle of the ‘offline-online-mobile’ intricacy.

So, how to come to know the significance of Mobile traffic for your Online Store? Before getting the answer to this global question, we’ll settle a few minor ones, namely:

Is your business in real need of being Mobile Optimized?
What to choose: developing a Mobile-Optimized website or investing in an Ecommerce Mobile Apps?
How to promote your Ecommerce Mobile App so that it might bring reaches?

Let us seek the answers in Google Analytics:

The first step is to track the total number of visitors to your website across various devices (desktops, mobile phones, tablets) over a certain period of time and to analyze the rate of growth rather than traffic shares. A good option might be a custom report from Google Solutions Gallery. To generate the report, just click Import and select the required resource.

The same holds true for tracking sales activity and performance: purchase and transaction data. Ideally, you’d better resort to cross-device analytics meant to show through which device users engage with your website. Though, if you’re lacking it so far, Google Analytics will be right spot-on to trace profit share generated by mobile traffic.
In case mobile accounts for more than 20% of e-retail traffic on your website, and the rate of mobile traffic growth is exceeding that of a desktop, it becomes crystal clear that more and more users tend to make purchases on mobile devices.
Hence, your next step is to come to grips with their preferences through tracking the most searched categories via mobile. Heat maps for monitoring the most viewed categories will come in right handy.
When it comes to a better understanding of customer behavior, demographic reports seem to be of no less importance. To reach the target market it’s pivotal to single out age groups of mobile vs desktop users. Young people aged 18-24 (the so-called new mobile generation) are more likely to generate a larger portion of mobile traffic.

All in all, these data are sufficient enough to make it pretty clear to yourself whether you need to drill into mobile direction or not.

It’s high time we got back to the dilemma: a Mobile-Optimized website or Ecommerce Mobile Apps? The answer is BOTH. To be more exact, the former is a MUST, the latter is DESIRABLE.

There is no point in hesitating: you simply can’t do without a Mobile-Optimized website, be it responsive layout or a separate mobile version. Mobile website is the first touchpoint of customer-seller interaction. With so many savvy users accessing the net on mobile devices, it comes out vital to optimize your website for mobile; otherwise you’re bound to lose a significant portion of traffic.

Thus, it makes sense to pose a different question: do you also need an Ecommerce Mobile App for your business? In case a user makes purchases from your online store on a regular basis, then a Mobile App appears to be the tool that is supposed to increase the frequency of transactions several fold. Now that more and more people go mobile, you have no other choice but to bring it home, that an Ecommerce Mobile App has long been more than just a separate business existing on its own.

Surely, it’s open and shut that a Mobile App is not a master key fitting in with every business. It fully depends on the type of products you’re dealing with and services you’re delivering. It would be funny to see an online store shipping slate, for example. Do not succumb to mass hysteria; if your product line revolves around such themes as books, apparel, foodstuffs, cosmetics, to name but a few, then an ecommerce mobile app would become a profitable investment (eBay, Amazon and the coupons App are a tiny bit among the plethora of best Mobile Apps).

Don’t fall for a poor excuse that Mobile Apps cost a bomb. It’s just a half-truth. The other side of truth is that a website does not cost less per se, as well as its regular maintenance and promotion. Bargaining with yourself is a reckless game in business. So, if you’ve finally managed to resolve the dilemma and are on your way to mobile optimization, contact us and we shall do our best to design a unique Mobile Application for your business, since we DO know how.