Winning ecommerce businesses understand the importance of a mobile strategy and providing users with a great mobile store experience. Ecommerce websites that plan to go mobile need to decide whether their mobile strategy needs to be responsive web design or a native ecommerce mobile app.
When you go with a responsive website design for ecommerce, you ensure that you keep a single URL for your mobile as well as web customers. This makes tracking of statistics easier. But with native mobile ecommerce apps, you can ensure that your business gets a great appeal from mobile users by giving users a great shopping experience.
Not only that, here are some of the undeniable reasons to use native mobile apps rather than just a responsive ecommerce website.
Far more popular with consumers
Native apps are far more popular with users. Mobile users are constantly flipping though their apps to find something interesting. Well, putting your products right into their hands and at their finger tips could mean greater sales and greater profits. Typing in a URL and locating your website, finding the product is just too time consuming. Customers want things quick!
Better UX than responsive web apps
User experience with native shopping apps has been observed to be better than websites. Native apps make use of the local features and the power of the mobile devices. They are typically faster than the web versions where internet services might slow things down. Shopping via a mobile app is simply more satisfying for the customers.
Mobile features like a camera or GPS etc. are used for greater functionality
Native apps make use of the features like GPS, Maps accelerometer etc. from the mobile phone, giving your app greater features that would otherwise not be possible via a web version.
Benefits from easy product promotions via push notifications
Marketing and other benefits to customers, such as push notifications for your latest offers and end of season sales would be possible only via a native app. Native app also ensures that your notifications reach the right audience.
It stays permanently on the mobile
The native app stays on the mobile device and hence increases the chances of a user simply tapping on it and purchasing the product they want! It’s simple for them and good for your business!
Development costs – not a problem anymore!
Well, if you are thinking how much is a native mobile app going to cost you, you can relax. Today, there are plenty of options available. For example, you can use a ready ecommerce mobile store. It’s simple and does not require a lot of technical skills. It gets your business to go mobile instantly and also preserves all your configuration for payment and sipping methods that you have set on your web version of the store. Affordable solutions are always available if you look at the right places!
Well, to conclude, I’d say, go with both – a responsive design plus a native app. Both of them matter for your ecommerce business!
