For eCommerce enterprises, the sky is the limit. Today, more people are shopping online than ever before. This remark holds in all businesses around the world. You may now reach customers anytime, from any location, via any device, thanks to the Internet’s power. However, the devices you choose to target them on will have a significant impact on your success.

It’s no secret that our lives have been taken over by mobile consumption. According to a recent study, 96 percent of American adults own a mobile phone. A smartphone is owned by 81 percent of the population. Take a look around. These devices are attached to everyone’s hands almost all of the time.

As a business owner, you must be aware of this and adapt accordingly. What are some ways you can use this data to boost your eCommerce sales? The answer is straightforward: your eCommerce store needs a mobile app.

With just a website, your eCommerce store will never attain its full potential. If you look at the most recent eCommerce trends, you’ll see that everything is moving toward mobile.

Is a mobile app, however, essential? Yes, it is essential!

All too frequently, I work with business owners who are satisfied with their eCommerce site’s growth, sales, and revenue. As a result, they don’t see why a mobile app is required.

That was the motivation for me to write this tutorial. You must develop a mobile eCommerce app if you want your brand and website to remain relevant in the following years. This is why:

1. Mobile commerce is on the rise.

Mobile device sales have thoroughly dominated the eCommerce business.

Examine your sales data to identify what devices your customers are using to shop. There’s a fair likelihood that many of those folks are using smartphones and tablets to browse and shop. In fact, mobile devices account for 67 percent of all eCommerce sales worldwide.

App for mobile commerce

Within the next two years, mobile commerce will account for 73% of all global eCommerce sales. People are already accustomed to purchasing on their phones. It’s simply handier than waiting for a computer to open. Our phones are always within reach, whereas a laptop or desktop computer isn’t always the case. Consumers purchase from a variety of sources. People can shop on the bus, train, or Uber thanks to mobile commerce. They are buying online during their lunch break or while walking down the street with a cup of coffee. It’s just too simple.

Mobile app development is the ideal solution for your eCommerce site to obtain a piece of the pie as mobile sales continue to rise in the future years. What is the reason for this? On the other hand, mobile shopping applications are rising at 54 percent year over year. In comparison to any other app category, this is the highest rate. Allow me to put that in context for you. In all industries, the average year-over-year growth rate of mobile app usage is 6%. As a result, shopping is 48 percent greater than the national average. Making a decision like this can often be as simple as reading between the lines. The eCommerce sector is dominated by mobile sales. Shopping applications are becoming more popular than any other form of software on the market. So you’ll know that eCommerce apps will contribute to mobile commerce sales by default.

2. Consumers Prefer Mobile Applications

Are you currently generating eCommerce sales from mobile devices without a mobile app? I’m going to assume the answer is yes. Some of you may look at that data and be satisfied knowing that you’re reaching smartphone and tablet users with your mobile site. However, you’re only scratching the surface. Please don’t get me wrong. Whether you have an app or not, you must have a mobile-friendly website. In fact, 85% of individuals believe that a website should appear as well as or better than its desktop counterpart.

Furthermore, after a terrible encounter with a mobile site, 88 percent of customers are less likely to return. A mobile site should load in two seconds or less, according to 47% of users. As a result, having a user-friendly mobile site is a must for earning eCommerce sales from mobile consumers.

Well at the end of the day, this is the most crucial figure:

Consumers would instead buy from an eCommerce store via an app than via a mobile website, according to 78 percent of respondents. 78 percent, to be exact. Allow that to sink in. This suggests that if you presently have 100 mobile transactions every week, about 80 of those users would prefer to purchase using your native app. And those are your current clients. Consider how many folks you’re missing out on because you don’t have a mobile app.

 The most common reasons why people prefer mobile apps to mobile websites. The top two factors are convenience and speed. In general, mobile apps provide a superior buying experience. Take a look at your own habits. Would you instead buy something for yourself from a website or an app when shopping online? Regardless of how fast or responsive a mobile website is, an app’s functionality will always give a better user experience. So, if your eCommerce site doesn’t have a mobile app, you’re missing out on a large portion of the market while giving your existing clients a bad experience. Even if you’re utilizing a renowned eCommerce platform like Shopify or Magento, this is true. Your online store will be taken to the next level with the help of an app builder.

3. Gain an advantage over the competitors

This is a follow-up to my previous point. Your eCommerce website is now at a disadvantage if it does not have a mobile app. Customers prefer to shop on mobile applications. Therefore it’ll only be a matter of time before they abandon your mobile site entirely. It’s good that you’re still generating mobile sales right now, but it won’t stay forever. Being an early adopter and developing an eCommerce mobile app, on the other hand, will provide you an advantage over other websites that do not.

If a customer can’t decide between your site and a competitor’s, the app will persuade them to buy from you. I understand what some of you are thinking because I’ve heard similar sentiments from other entrepreneurs. You don’t believe any of your major competitors have a mobile app. Therefore there’s no reason for you to get one now. For the time being, you’ll merely concentrate on building a better website than your competitors.

Unfortunately, that is the incorrect mindset.

I don’t mean to be rude, but if you don’t think your competitors have a mobile app, you’re insane.

Amazon is currently competing with every eCommerce shop on the planet. They sell pretty about anything under the sun. Amazon Prime is used by 95 million people in the United States alone. Sure, your branded products might not be available on Amazon. But how distinctive are you? Is it possible for a consumer to get something similar from a different brand on Amazon’s app? Most likely. As a result, people will associate your site with the “Amazon experience” anytime they come. If you can’t meet those requirements, the buyer will have no incentive to buy from you.

There’s one more thing to consider. Today, a mobile app will provide you a competitive advantage, but this will not be the case in the future. Everyone will have a mobile commerce app in the coming years. So it’s to your best advantage to make one right now so you can get a jump start on everyone else who arrived late.

4. Make a One-of-a-Kind Shopping Experience

Personalization is an essential part of eCommerce success. Some of you may already be employing tailored marketing strategies to boost eCommerce sales. When a customer signs up to receive emails from your company, for example, you might divide them into categories based on their age, gender, or location. Then, to improve their experience, you can send them customized emails. The bulk of eCommerce websites employ some of these fundamental strategies.

With an eCommerce mobile app, personalization is taken to the next level. You can use an app to track a user’s browsing and purchasing history to make personalized recommendations. This can be done from a website, but it requires the consumer to be logged in all of the time, so it’s much easier to do through an app.

When it comes to online buying, 63 percent of customers desire a personalized experience. This is an increase from 57 percent two years ago. As a result, this is a continuation of the increasing trend. Consumers can easily view their complete purchase history using an app, making it possible for them to swiftly reorder repeat purchases. These customer profiles may also track customer awards, which I’ll go over in more detail in the next section.

5. Improve Customer Satisfaction

Implementing a customer loyalty program is a terrific approach to entice your consumers to spend more money. Your clients are more likely to join this program if you have an eCommerce mobile app. Customers are also 82 percent more inclined to shop on sites that provide reward programs.

You should absolutely take advantage of this opportunity. Customers can check their progress in a program in real-time through an app, which connects to our earlier point about personalisation. A loyalty program encourages your consumers to spend more money to earn their next prize. Here are a few instances to demonstrate what I mean.

Transactions are one way to set up your loyalty program. It’s a virtual punch card if you will. If you order something 5 times using the app, you’ll get a discount on your 6th purchase. Another option to design a loyalty program is to reward consumers based on the amount of money they spend over a set period of time. Customers who spend $500 over a year will receive a reward or incentive. Customers who spend $1,000 over a year will receive even more benefits.

To reach the next spending tier, consumers are psychologically encouraged to increase their average order value as well as their buy frequency. On your website, some of you may already have a loyalty program. However, using a mobile app to execute the same offer will be even more effective.

More than ever, entrepreneurs are realising the importance of having a mobile app. There is a lot of mobile app development software out there where you can sort of do-it-yourself. These kinds of software are relatively easy-to-use and anyone can use them. But experts recommend that it is still worth investing in hiring a dedicated mobile app developer. Here are 4 reasons why you should do so.

Create more modifications fit for your business
Mobile app development software offers free or paid templates you can start working on. It’s really easy-to-use as you can drag-and-drop or cut-and-paste as you wish. However, since it is templated, there isn’t much space to be creative. You’ll run the risk of your mobile app looking live everyone else’s. With a deducted mobile app developer, you can modify the user interface to maximize user experience.

Get the latest cutting-edge technology
You can get ahead of the pack with the latest cutting-edge technology. You don’t have to wait until the feature is available on the mobile app development software you’re using. An app developer or engineer can apply those latest updates right away so that your customers get the best shopping experience. You can even do some AB testing wherein half of your customers will see an update while half do not so you can measure the efficacy of the changes rolled out.

Have real-time support for any app issues
If you are constantly updating your mobile app, it is understandable that you will encounter errors and glitches. It is only normal to have these issues once in a while. The important thing is to have support when you need it. While a mobile app development software may have a help centre, it is often a centralised one and you need to wait in a queue to be assisted. Unless you are on a premium membership, the turnaround time might take at least 24 hours. This is definitely not ideal for your customers. Having a dedicated mobile app developer can quickly apply fixes as soon as the problem arises.

Build relationships, not just generate revenue
Any digital marketer would agree that the cost of acquiring new customers is very high especially when you do not have many customer relationships established yet. By understanding your customer’s journey better, you can start building relationships with them. A mobile app developer can help you make changes to their overall shopping experience and thus, keeping your customers loyal to your brand. It won’t just be about generating revenue but also creating promoters so that they repurchase from you and also influence others to do the same.

Having a mobile app developer can be quite costly especially if you are just starting your business. However, it is an investment that is surely worth it! These are just four reasons why it is a good idea to do so but this list can go on and on. The cost will surely outweigh the wins that you will get by having a well-designed and highly functioning mobile app.

From the moment your customer lays eyes on your ad in Google, to the time she is trying out your product at home spans your user journey. What is the User Journey exactly and why is it important to understand? How can you apply your understanding of this journey to your website and benefit from it?

User journey dictates your customer’s experience and overall feedback with your brand. It is important to know what your customers experience when they are interacting with your brand so you can identify pain points and areas for improvement. By doing so, you can encourage these customers to return and purchase from you again, or they can encourage others to purchase from you, thus, leading to more revenue.

It starts from the moment they start interacting with your brand, be it in a form of an ad on Facebook or they got a promotional email. As the saying goes, ‘first impressions last.” Marketers say that you only have less than 3 seconds to catch the attention of potential customers. It is crucial to understand how your customer perceives your ad or how your email promotion reads so that you can optimise it and attract more customers.It starts from the moment they start interacting with your brand, be it in a form of an ad on Facebook or they got a promotional email. As the saying goes, ‘first impressions last.” Marketers say that you only have less than 3 seconds to catch the attention of potential customers. It is crucial to understand how your customer perceives your ad or how your email promotion reads so that you can optimise it and attract more customers.

Next, you need to understand the usability of your website. Are your customers able to navigate the website without any problems? Is the experience seamless or are there missing links or pages that won’t load? Are the photos and descriptions of the products accurate and easy to understand? How is the checkout process? Does your customer feel secure enough to give their payment information? These are just some questions that are worth asking once you are evaluating the purchase and checkout experience of your customer so that there are no deterrents in closing the sale.

The customer’s journey doesn’t end after they make their purchase. In fact, it is far from over! It is important to understand the order fulfilment process and identify if your promised service levels are being met. There isn’t much transparency on this part of the user journey as the customer doesn’t have physical access to your product or warehouse. As such, you need to be as transparent as possible with them, providing them with dispatch and delivery updates regularly and proactively. By doing so, you foster trust and confidence with your customers and you can start building a reputation in the industry.

Lastly, you also need to understand your customer’s return experience. If ever they need to return the product, how easy or hard is the returns process? Are they getting their credits or refunds in a timely manner? It is also important to take note of these as this is often the part of the user journey wherein a lot of customer dissatisfaction occurs.

Indeed, understanding the user journey brings a lot of insights that you can use for you the development of your website. It is just a matter of putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and understanding their needs and their experience.

You’ve taken the leap and started developing your mobile app. You’re just about ready to launch but before you do so, you need to make sure you advertise it well. After all, there are about 3 million mobile apps currently and you don’t want your app to just be another number to that tally. You need to make sure you enter the game strong so don’t get lost in the sea of mobile apps. Here are 8 different ways to advertise your app.

Start a blog or partner with a blog in your niche
A blog can be a great way to introduce your blog to your target niche. It might take some time for your blog to gain traffic so you can partner with a well-established blog to get great results fast.

Harness the power of social media
Create a solid social media following through which you can advertise your app. Your audience will see through click-bait posts so make sure that your posts have good content so that it’s click-worthy and share-worthy.

Partner with influencers
Identify reputable influencers within your niche that can promote your app to their followers. If the influencer you’re working with already has a huge following, getting your app noticed will be a piece of cake!

Record a podcast
Identify podcasts that target your niche and ask to collaborate. The podcast can be a great way to increase awareness of your app and address any questions or concerns that users may have. Being interviewed by a reputable podcast can also score big on your own reputation.

Host a contest
There are a lot of social media accounts that regularly holds a contest to boost user traffic. You can also do the same to get people to notice your app. Mechanics can be as simple as liking your social media page and tagging a friend. Make sure that the mechanics are not too hard or else people won’t bother joining it.

Explore Google Adwords
Adwords is an online advertising platform wherein you can display brief ads, service pr listings, as well as videos to web users. If you are able to identify the keywords that your target niche uses, you can take advantage of this advertising platform and reach your potential customers.

Ask for customer ratings
Once you have a few downloads, encourage your users to leave a review. You can explicitly ask them by the form of pop-ups, or you can reward each review with a form of compensation. You just need to be careful that you do not influence your users to leave good feedback in order to receive compensation as it might break fair trade practices.

Offer free trials
You can encourage users to download your paid app by offering free trials for a limited time. This will allow users to test your app without any risk and experience for themselves the usability of your app. You just need to make sure that you continually engage your users to keep using your app.

In this technologically advanced world, your business’s online presence dictates its success. The saying, “a business without a sign is a sign of no business” no longer applies. You can make it in this space even if you do not have a physical store or a physical sign. If you, however, have these 8 elements of a good website, your business can succeed.

Have a clear goal

Oftentimes, a business owner already has a goal in mind before starting a website. However, the excitement of starting up a website might lead to you to different paths. It is important to have one clear goal in mind and align all objectives towards this goal. Make a list of what you want and what you hope the result will be.

Clear navigation
Clear and easy navigation will help your customers find what they are looking for. If your website doesn’t have clear navigation, it will result to your customers getting lost and losing interest. Additionally, it also helps search engines to index your web pages easily so that it appears at the top search results. By doing so, you funnel through more customers to your website.

Beautiful Home Page
It is the first page that your visitors will see so you need to make sure it is beautiful and eye-catching! You may only have a few seconds to catch the interest of your website visitors so it is important to have all the areas of your product or business carefully and aesthetically laid out! You can also highlight your brand’s unique selling point so you can keep your customer interested.

Complete information
It is important to provide accurate information on your website. Photos should depict the products just as how they look in real life. The product description should be complete but easy to read. No one wants to read paragraphs and paragraphs of product info! It should be concise and easy to understand.

Call to Action
A good website doesn’t just have to be beautiful, accurate and complete. It also needs a call to action button! It should be displayed clearly and prominently, but subtle as well so that it’s not too “in your face” that it might become annoying for your customers.

Don’t forget mobile users
Over half of your website visitors will be using their mobile phones so it is important to make sure your website is optimised for mobile browsing. It is important that the text is still displayed well on a smaller screen so that it doesn’t go over photos or other buttons.

About us page
Most website owners do not give much importance to the About us page. However, it should definitely not be skipped! If you are a new company, you are still building your reputation among the market and having an ‘About us’ page will help you introduce your company to your customers and potential customers.

Harness the power of social media
It is important to also harness a strong social media following! You can create a strong community wherein your customers can share feedback about your brand or ideas that promote your product. As such, they will develop an affinity and loyalty to your brand.

Despite the recent pandemic and the economic uncertainty that it brought, eCommerce has continued to thrive. More and more entrepreneurs are taking their business online and selling their products right into their customer’s computers or mobile phones.

If you are one of them, there is no doubt that you are constantly looking for the best tool to manage your online business. You might be already selling on an eCommerce platform and thinking if you really need to get a separate Content Management System. If you are in the market to find the best one for your business, here are 5 of the best content management system for eCommerce websites

1. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is one of the leading eCommerce platforms at the moment and also offer a separate content management system. As they provide support for both platforms, they have created seamless integration to facilitate the growth of your online business. You can manage your online shop while managing content all in the same tool. Their built-in features are intuitive enough so that even eCommerce beginners can thrive and succeed.

2. WordPress

WordPress is the most popular CMS tool in the industry. However, it doesn’t feature an eCommerce platform in itself and thus, you need to subscribe to a separate one. But it should not be a problem as the WooCommerce plugin enables you to quickly transform your website into an online store. It features a lot of themes and extensions that are completely free of charge.

3. Joomla

It is a open-source content management platform that allows a user to build websites and publish content online. It does require a certain skill to fully optimise all its functionalities so it might not be the best option for beginners. However, once you have mastered this CMS tool, you can create a seamless user interface that your customers will enjoy.

4. Shopify

Shopify is a SaaS ecommerce platform that has a simple interface and affordable pricing, thus making it one of the most popular eCommerce platforms for startup businesses. It’s plans and features can accommodate growing businesses as they scale up. It’s built-in features allows the user to publish content with a simple click of a button, no coding needed whatsoever. Shopify also allows users to edit and code manually, so it’s a good balance between the two.

5. Wix

Wix’s easy-to-use website building platform has made it to one of our top contenders for CMS tools today. Although it is not inherently an ecommerce CMS, business owners have the option to add the commerce module on their website. It’s no-code and drag-and-drop approach has made them very popular for start-up businesses with limited products and for those who are not technically savvy but would like to start their own eCommerce store.

Whichever you decide to build first – your eCommerce website or your content – these tools can help you achieve your dream online store and help you get your business quickly off the ground. Most of these tools require no to little training so anyone can get in the game and start selling online.