Why Shopping Apps Equal Success

So you’re a retail­er and you’ve built a shop­ping app. Now what? Accord­ing to Mar­ket­ing Land, you should ready your­self for a sig­nif­i­cant shift in the way your con­sumers trans­act with you. Their recent report states that, “retail­ers with shop­ping apps see a major­i­ty of e‑commerce sales from mobile.”

Before you get too excit­ed, this doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that you’ll secure more sales (although it should, and more on that in a minute), but it does mean you are meet­ing the expe­ri­en­tial needs of your consumer.

Accord­ing to the arti­cle: “Retail­ers that have both mobile sites and apps are see­ing, on aver­age, two-thirds of their online sales com­ing from mobile devices.” They are shift­ing away from desk­top and—even—mobile sites that often need more touch­points for trans­ac­tions to com­plete, towards apps that are usu­al­ly designed to be more intu­itive to the needs of some­one who wants speed and convenience.”

If a desk­top is the full meal and mobiles an appe­tis­er, then apps are the snack­able hors d’oeurves—good for quick bites of instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion to fill the shop­ping stomach.

Con­sumers today are time and patience-light. At Adobe, our cus­tomers are advised to include AI- or machine-learn­ing tools into their cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, whether it be sim­ple adjust­ments such as auto-input cus­tomer pro­file tabs, through to sug­gest­ed add-on pur­chas­es based on details that have been learnt through expe­ri­ence and input of data. And we put our mon­ey where our mouth is, as Adobe Sen­sei is wrapped into every­thing we do.

What can be achieved through app devel­op­ment? Accord­ing to the arti­cle: “As you might expect, con­ver­sion rates on mobile apps are high­er, rough­ly 3x greater than on the mobile web. This may be because the user expe­ri­ence is bet­ter in apps, includ­ing the check­out process. But it may also part­ly be because those who down­load and use retail apps are more loy­al and inclined to buy from those retail­ers in the first place.”

Essen­tial­ly, if you build it, con­sumers will come. Because that’s the expe­ri­ence they want today—one that is fric­tion­less, pre­dic­tive and easy to trans­act with.

If you’re a retail­er, have you got a shop­ping app? How is it per­form­ing for you? And if you don’t, do you plan on build­ing one? Let us know in the com­ments sec­tion below.