Mobile apps have become an integral part of our lives! From getting woken up by an alarm in the morning to hearing soothing music on our way to slumberland at night, we use at least a dozen apps a day as we go about our lives. We are not even counting the apps that deliver news, current affairs and other feeds to your phone and the social media apps of your choice.
Though the entertainment and gaming industries still dominate mobile apps, they have found uses in various fields while making daily life easy for the general public as well. From making grocery lists to stock trading, there seems to be an app for everything indeed! Apple knew what they were doing when they trademarked their tagline, “There’s an app for that!”
Life Before Shopping Apps
Mobile apps have transformed the way we shop online. Before their coming, online shopping was done almost exclusively on desktop browsers. People visited the online shopping websites on their desktop or laptop computers via a dedicated internet connection. Online shopping on the go was never heard of.
In the beginning, most e-commerce websites were not even mobile friendly. More often than not, they were neither compatible nor usable on mobile devices. Once smartphones started arriving on the scene, most online shopping portals woke up to the potential of mobile phones in increasing sales and began developing mobile versions of their websites. But the user experience in the mobile sites remained quite similar to that of the full website. And then came the mobile apps and turned out to be the biggest game changers ever in e-commerce!
Mobile Apps Change Shopping As We Know It!
Mobile apps have made online shopping a more comfortable and better experience for users. They provide a bite-sized portion of information at a time that helps people to study one product after another and select the right one they are looking for. Search, filter and sort options further assist in enhancing the inherently high usability of mobile apps. Quick zooming and rotating features make it possible for users to get a complete view or a detailed picture, so to speak, of the product. What customers see is indeed what they get. Apps have access to and leverage the features of the smartphone itself, such as GPS, Camera, Scanner and Bluetooth to enhance the shopping experience significantly. Thus, more and more people are now opting to use mobile apps instead of mobile websites or regular websites to shop online.
Every Online Business Should Have A Mobile App!
Mr. Andrew, who entered e-commerce business with Florist Chennai, talks about how mobile apps help increase sales. He quotes - “Businesses large and small are resorting to developing mobile apps to drive up sales as well as to promote their brand.”
They provide all the necessary details of the product upfront – no hidden costs – so users get to make informed decisions while shopping.” Some of them can even be used offline. Loading time for apps is very less, and the user gets to skip steps like opening a browser or typing in a URL. There is no more worry about websites not working on certain web browsers – apps have done away with the concept of cross-browser compatibility!
So, if you are the owner of an online business, you would do well to jump on the bandwagon of mobile apps too. Build yourself a mobile app and watch your business grow beyond your wildest imagination!