Every e-commerce business owner understands the importance of having a fully-functional website to sell their products online. Sure, we can’t underestimate the power of e-commerce websites when it comes to selling online.
But with the increasing usage of mobile phones, especially those of smartphones, having an app for any e-commerce business can provide an additional competitive advantage to the business.
Why is it so?
Although mobile applications have been here for around a decade, but not all of the businesses are taking its advantage.
So, if you have an e-commerce business or intend to start one, you can consider building a mobile app to beat your competition.
In this blog post, I will be sharing 7 major reasons of “Why e-commerce apps are better than e-commerce websites“.
#1 Mobile Apps Are Faster
Have you noticed how fast mobile apps work vs websites?
Yes, its true. Mobile apps work 1.5 times faster than websites.
There are 2 reasons behind the fast processing of mobile applications:
A. Since mobile apps save date locally on a device, it can retrieve & render the stored data in the blink of an eye. While in case of websites, the data has to be fetched from the web server and this process takes few seconds or a minute, depending upon the network speed.
B. Most of the mobile apps are developed using JavaScript that helps to process the data within fraction of seconds.
The loading speed of any e-commerce website or app is as important as its existence. Therefore, a mobile app can prove to be more efficient than a website when it comes to the speed.
#2 Mobile Apps Facilitates Personalisation
Users love to see personalised content on their devices because it’s like offering them a tailored message in the language they speak & understand.
Personalisation can be on the basis of a user’s interest, location or behaviour etc. With the help of personalised communication, the businesses are able to engage their users in a better & efficient way.
A website, however, is not able to communicate with the users in a personal manner.
#3 Mobile Apps Work Offline Too
We all know that a website is totally dependent on an internet connection to work & render pages, unless the users have saved those pages in their offline content.
But with the help of latest technologies, a mobile application is able to save the data locally on a user’s device that can be viewed by him or her at a later point of time.
#4 Mobile Apps Enable Push Notifications
One of the biggest advantages of having a mobile application for any e-commerce business is its ability to send out push notifications.
A push notification is a short message that is being sent out to the users’ device, almost instantly.
The e-commerce business owners can send out messages about new offers, discounts and fresh arrivals to their app users that can help them to grab more sales.
The feature of push notifications is not very effective in case of a website because in case of mobile apps, the users get notifications straight to their devices, instead of a PC’s browser.
#5 Mobile Apps Improve Productivity
A mobile app can help e-commerce businesses to improve their productivity too. With an application handy for every department like sales, delivery, warehouse etc., the whole business process can become automated that can help to improve their productivity.
In case of websites too, the process can be made automated however because of the speed performance & offline working ability of mobile apps, websites are not that effective.
However, in order to achieve high productivity through a mobile application, you need to make sure that your app maker understands your business process well.
#6 Mobile Apps Enhance Engagement
Ability to engage customers with any e-commerce business determines the level of its success. The more customers are engaged to any business, the higher will be its sales figure in terms of repeated business & up-selling. And a mobile application does a great job of engaging customers with its business.
One of the best ways to enhance user engagement through your app is to send out regular push notifications. Therefore, you must ensure that your app development proposal has a push notification feature as well.
A website, however is not very effective in engaging the customers because of its limited access.