Shopping using a smartphone is not really a trend but rather an expected progression of the way people would interact with a business and for a matter of fact, is a consumer behavior driven by convenience that will only make mCommerce bigger. Some of the big research firms indicate that mobile e-commerce sales is expected to grow to over 54% of total e-commerce sales by 2021. Wow that’s a huge opportunity, isn’t it?
The number just reiterates the point, that retailers need to be geared to offer their customers with a very easy and friction-less journey when they are interested to do business with you. And to ride the wave (than to be engulfed by it) you need to create a shopping experience that is super seamless, using a robust mobile based digital strategy.
Why have an e-commerce mobile app?
Mobile and Desktop users present different sets of challenges as well as opportunities. The general trend has been for a customer to gather information using the phone and then complete the actual purchase on the desktop. This trend is obviously being slowly reversed with users placing more trust in apps and being more comfortable storing their payment information within apps as well as the wide scale use of the different mobile wallets.
The real trick being; building loyalty with customers and offering value for engagement encouraging visitors to come back to you again and again. Repeat customers are very likely to download your app, which provides you with a captive audience and helps in increasing your ARPU.
There is absolutely no doubt that a dedicated app provides better User Experience and also enable a personalized shopping experience when compared to a website, because of which the conversion rates, user engagement and sales are much better.
Technology and mCommerce
Most of the retail biggies have their mCommerce apps out there already. Which obviously helps them distinguish themselves from their peers and engage with their customers in a much efficient way. According to company Criteo’s survey, retail mobile apps have a conversion rate that is 3.7 times more than a mobile website.
Mobile and Web technologies have marched way forward in the last few years, staying with legacy systems would really cripple a business and not allow to respond quickly to constantly changing consumer behavior. To start with, migrating to cloud and enabling API’s would be a good solution to acquire the flexibility to respond to market changes as the initial steps of mCommerce.
How to have a highly converting e-commerce Mobile App?
- Fraud Mitigation: Would be a good idea to use a well-known trusted payment gateway to store customer payment info, and who might have their own tried and tested fraud prevention procedures. In-case you decide to store data within the app, you should do scheduled security audits and implement a good security software within the app to mitigate online fraud or loss of data. Might be worthwhile to look at integrating your app with some of the popular e-wallets as well, to gain customer trust and enable a seamless shopping experience.
- User-centric Design: The entire app should be developed around the user with a great deal on emphasis on User Experience and User Interface. As much as it is important to provide a good-looking app, it is equally important to provide a friction-less user journey as well. In the ideal scenario, it is better to start with an MVP app with the capability of doing A/B testing of colors, menu structure, placement etc, which would allow you to back your design with data and usage patterns.
- Machine Learning and AI: An integrated solution is really the way to go where different software components share data with each other. A customer would want to see things that are relevant or are of interest to them. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence allows to segment customers into buckets based on their usage patterns and then show them relevant or related products etc. Data is really a gold mine is used correctly as it helps you quickly identify trends and patterns to help drive strategies.
- Leveraging Emerging Technologies: People tend to quickly latch on to new technologies or at-least it piques their interest. Hence it is very important to analyse different ways of implementing features around Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Image Recognition, Voice Based Search, Chatbot Assistants for shopping etc
Conclusion
Customers totally transitioning to a mobile first experience is not really a thing of far-away future, is set to happen in the next couple of years. You must be ready by then with a stable and robust application to stay in competition. By adopting and implementing a proven IT practice and the early adoption of cloud-based ecosystem can empower retailers to have a solution that is agile and coherent with market demands.
As a human being, a visitor would prefer a personalized experience and would go for a retailer who is able to understand his/her needs, like, dislikes and provide a humane touch. Obviously technology alone isn’t enough to enable this, but it definitely sets the stage to provide such a unique experience via an mCommerce solution.
Contact info@bizmindz.com to know how we can help you begin your mCommerce business.