The advent of the pandemic and the general digitalization of life has made us more willing to reach for the solution, which is online shopping. For this reason, anyone planning to operate in the e-commerce industry should focus on a properly developed mobile application for the online store.
Mobile version of an online store – or what?
There are several ways in which online stores serve customers who want to make purchases via smartphone or tablet: through a website adapted to this purpose or through a mobile application. The mobile version of an online store is nothing more than developing a website to work with the resolution of a tablet or smartphone. Thanks to this, the website can be operated similarly to a computer but using the mentioned devices.
Mobile application – yes or no?
Another solution that can be implemented to prepare a fully functional online store is to create a mobile application. It is worth remembering, however, that such an option is more expensive. Therefore, designing a mobile application should be considered only by big entities with many clients and sure that such an investment will pay off. Among the entities that successfully bet on such a solution, we can point to popular brands such as Rossmann, H&M and Empik.
Why is the mobile version of an online store so important?
Although in B2B, most transactions are still made from the computer, retail buyers have primarily switched to buying from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Why? There are at least several reasons for this. The primary reason is convenience: shopping can be done in just a few clicks, and when you also have your bank’s mobile app, paying for your order takes even less time. In addition, we can make purchases wherever we are – regardless of whether we are currently at home, university or work: doing small errands that need to arrive as quickly as possible will not take more than a few minutes. With this feature also comes another advantage of shopping online from a smartphone: accessibility. We don’t have to wait until we have access to a laptop or desktop computer, so we are less likely to forget essential errands.
What does mobile-first mean?
The mobile-first approach is worth implementing if we are only at the stage of creating an online store, which we have commissioned from a proven company such as Cut2Code. In such a situation, during the design process, the needs of the store’s mobile version are taken into account, and not its desktop version, as according to the market forecasts – the share of the latter will gradually decrease and finally become marginal in the entire online sales.
An adequately created mobile version of an online store can positively influence the website’s conversion. The user, who will quickly go through the order completion and payment process, will undoubtedly be more willing to return to the idea of making a purchase.