Is your company built on e-commerce? If so, you better consider mobile as part of your marketing and purchasing strategy. Your customers are increasingly researching and buying products on their mobile devices, and accommodating their habits can be the key to growing your business and customer base.
A recent article in the Denver Business Journal highlights the importance of mobile in e-commerce. In a case study of mobile success, Denver company eBags built a mobile app that helped push its mobile sales to increase by 80% in the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday this year.
The Case of eBags
One of the first e-commerce companies, eBags launched 17 years ago with a clear goal: helping its audience buy any type of travel equipment without needing to go to a store. From luggage to backpacks and travel electronics, the company has long sold its goods on its own, dedicated website.
Over time, eBags realized that it needed more. Its first dabbles in the mobile spaces were pure duplication. According to CEO Mike Edwards, “We used to focus on site experience and mirror that on mobile.”
But increasingly, the company began to notice that mobile users behave differently than their desktop counterparts. Most importantly, speed matters: “If they cannot find what they are looking for in less than four seconds, we wouldn’t win the mobile moment,” Edwards told the Denver Business Journal.
So the company built an innovative mobile app that turns its luggage into ‘smart’ luggage, helping users track what’s inside through their phone. The result, as mentioned above, was a 92% increase in mobile visits and 80% increase in mobile sales.
Understanding Mobile E-Commerce Trends
eBags is taking advantage of a trend that is becoming increasingly clear: our attention is moving to mobile devices. In 2015, mobile internet usage overtook its desktop counterpart for the first time, and the gap has began to widen since. Why turn on our computer when we can simply check and research products on our smartphones and tablets?
That trend holds true in e-commerce as well. Almost one third of all e-commerce purchases now come from mobile devices, another number that’s expected to keep growing. In fact, 42% of consumers believe that they will become more likely to use their tablets and smartphones to purchase items in the future.
The e-commerce market, in other words, is moving toward mobile. It may still be lagging behind the increasing dominance of overall internet usage at this point, but all arrows point toward the fact that with each passing year, establishing an effective mobile presence to help market and sell your products increases in importance.
Building a Mobile App for E-Commerce Success
In short, both the case study of E-Bags and more general mobile usage trends in e-commerce suggest the same basic truth: to succeed in this type of business model, accommodating your users on smartphones and tablets is absolute key. If you don’t, you will increasingly begin to see your customers move on to competitors who do offer them opportunities to research and buy products online.
In other words, just like eBags, you need a mobile app. Your app should allow your audience to not just do research, but also buy products and add unique value to your core offering. If that app is integrated with your products themselves, you’re poised to succeed in e-commerce.
Of course, that means working with an app development company that has experience in both the mobile and e-commerce space. For help in that regard, contact us. We’d love to work with you in making sure that your e-commerce business positions itself for the current and future mobile boom with a compelling and user-friendly app.
