Ecommerce App Advantages

[YeOldeOke]

Our website is already mobile friendly, and about half our customers seem to use mobile to access and purchase.

Now, I'm like an old oke. To me a phone is useful to SPEAK to someone. That's it. I don't want it to also change a flat tyre. But I'm not a customer, and the customer is king.

What I don't really see is the advantage of an app vs mobile-friendly website. Is it just the icon readily available on the phone (apart from maybe slightly faster loading time though my server is brilliant) or are there other serious advantages justifying what seems to be a substantial investment?

Can someone enlighten me more than the pages of app marketing does? All they point to is how mobile ecommerce is growing etc. Stuff i know but still doesn't convince me an app vs website is worth the investment. Except maybe the icon on the phone to tap and you're there.

 

[maxxis]

Push notifications?

Also look at PWA instead of a dedicated app.

 

[YeOldeOke]

I'll have to read up on that, thanks.

Granted, the icon on the phone is a big deal, if I understand the app world correctly, but is it possible to just have a small app that links to the existing website?

 

[CranialBlaze]

Very much depends on the nature of your business, but in most cases it’s probably only a good idea if you have a very loyal customer base AND a PWA (Progressive Web App)does not fit your needs.

In the context of e-commerce, the only real advantage to an app over a PWA, would be push notifications, which used poorly will just piss off your customers anyway, but it’s a potentially useful for shipping notifications or wishlist items being back in stock and such things and they are more immediate than emails in many cases.

If needed you’d have more reliable offline persistence for user data reducing the need to actually communicate with your server for trivial things and maybe do quick freshness checks.

A PWA can do all of that, but there are hard set limitations which vary by OS and browser.

For a company like Takealot, an app is an absolute no brainer, they sell anything and everything and millions of it so that creates an almost “loyal” custom base as it’s not a place many would visit occasionally, they visit almost daily, their app even includes a barcode scanner so you can shop IRL, and still buy from them.

Some people quite probably do wonder around places like builders not 100% sure if what they need, they find it, scan the barcode and then buy from TA as they almost always cheaper and it may not be an urgent purchase.

A site like woot ware for example, a reason for them to get the app is their site is ****ed up slow, but that’s just Magento, other than that there would be no business reason to build an app, using a better framework to improve the sites performance , especially over mobile would be a far more valuable use of money.

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

Apps bring a lot of complexities that even large e-commerce companies are not prepared for. The reason why feature parity with their desktop site trails and is often just a light version.

I always advise sticking to websites that can render on mobile.

If your e-commerce store grows big enough that you can afford a team of app developers (and the supporting backend team), then go for it.

 

[ronz91]

I think a website that works well on mobile with a good email notification system should be good enough