Can A Mobile App Benefit My E-Commerce Website?

Apps are everywhere, and they do more or less everything in one way or another: you can plan your train journey on one, check your email on another; you can open and export documents, map a route, check your bank account, make your phone into a WiFi hotspot. Apps can be transformative.

But can they also be profitable? Let’s say you have an e-commerce website … can a mobile app benefit it? These little widgets of software might be useful to users, but what about online sellers?

To anyone asking this question, we can only say: where have you been? E-commerce apps are everywhere, and they can support your website endlessly, creating new customers, encouraging existing ones to buy more and more regularly, and even enabling you to introduce new product lines or routes to market.

So how come mobile apps are so beneficial to e-commerce websites? There are four main reasons – so listen up: here’s the science bit.

1. Apps help streamline your website for use on mobile devices. Mobile browsing is now overtaking desktop-based browsing as the primary means by which users interact with the web. Designing a mobile app enables you to provide a version of your site-packages precisely for mobiles. This enhances the user experience, as users are able to shop on your website without needing to type in a URL – and a better experience means more repeat visits, and more sales.

2. Apps enable you to utilise mobile phone features. Mobile apps have the ability to leverage phone features including GPS, Camera, Apple Pay, Android Pay, and various other features. This means you can direct users to physical stores nearby, encourage them to scan barcodes for price comparisons and accept all manner of instant payments. Adding features to a shopping experience in this way is a sure way of making that experience more attractive to customers.

3. Apps help you provide a personalised shopping experience. Mobile apps are able to collect valuable data to analyse the user’s browsing behaviours, purchase history, and demographic profiles. This can empower their decision making – by allowing you to suggest the products that are right for them. Get a head start on understanding your customers’ needs.

4. Apps permit social integration. From Facebook to Instagram, Twitter to Snapchat, users want to share their shopping – and social is how they do it. By integrating your app with your customers’ favourite platforms, you benefit from the sort of word-of-mouth buzz that powers sales in the peer-to-peer environment of the internet.

The question, then, isn’t so much whether a mobile app can benefit your mobile website – it’s by how much.

Contact ImagePlus for Mobile App Development

We provide mobile app design and development for all project requirements, both consumer and business apps. If you’re in need of a mobile app or just have an idea for a project you wish to discuss, please contact us to arrange a consultancy.

Call us on 024 7683 4780 or email us at info@image-plus.co.uk.