7 Must-Have Features for Every Mobile Commerce App

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7 Must-Have Features for Every Mobile Commerce App

We are in the era of digitized shopping where traditional brick-and-mortar stores are constantly moving towards creating their online presence. Even modern shoppers are looking for convenience while fulfilling their shopping needs. All of this is just the beginning of something much bigger for the future of online shopping.

Scalability and profitability are crucial factors for traditional commerce to survive in a technologically driven future. Mobile commerce is a relatively newer term currently being used for the marketing of online retail mobile applications.

Any successful retail website must have done some research before creating their best-in-class website that caters to their audience’s need for a convenient shopping experience.

So, getting back to my point on convenience. What better way to shop online while sitting on your sofa watching TV than to shop through your mobile phone.

What is Mobile Commerce? 

Any eCommerce enterprise with a dedicated mobile website successfully caters to the convenience of online shopping to its audience.

Certain features remain constant for every mCommerce application, whether you have a B2B or a B2C business model.

This article will list seven of such features needed to keep your ship afloat on a stormy day.

Top 7 Features that are required for your mobile commerce app to be successful 

While all the features listed below could be a topic of their own separately, we will be very specific on the most useful information.

  1. Push Notifications

Push notifications are handy to update users about new products, offers, and other helpful information. However, they are not very efficient on desktops as most users don’t use these devices all the time.

Mobile phones are always with the user and are a perfect source for companies to show notifications relevant to their needs. Therefore, companies can use this feature to their advantage by showing them personalized offers and interest-based products.

Some important notifications increase the overall customer experience, such as order-related updates, shipping orders, and order delivery that the user might be interested in.

There are some downsides to this feature, and there is a fine line between essential notifications and notifications that are spammy. You need to realize this line and show them the right notification at the right time.

  1. Location Tracking

Targeted promotion is important for both the business and its customers. With the help of location tracking, eCommerce businesses can notify their users about products, offers, and discounts relevant to their location.

70% of app users find push notifications extremely useful, and for this reason, 53% of these users are willing to share details, such as their location.

The above stats are critical while defining your push notification strategy. There are many different ways you can leverage location tracking and include it in your mCommerce marketing plan.

Use case of location tracking. 

Here is a basic example to showcase how versatile location tracking can be.

Flipp’s Nearby Clippings

Flipp’s Nearby Clippings

Flipp’s (A couponing company) app uses the location of their users to notify them about stores nearby for the items they have shown interest in before.

  1. Customer Loyalty Program

A mobile app is a perfect platform for promoting your customer loyalty program. In addition, for the companies that already have a loyalty program and even websites starting from scratch, a mobile application is perfect for deploying and managing new and existing loyalty programs.

Let’s dive a bit deeper on this topic with the help of examples: 

Shopkick loyalty program

Shopkick has around 6 million users, which makes them the most utilized shopping mobile application. For every customer entering the store and buying the products, customer loyalty rewards are presented in tokens. Tokens could be:

  • Redeemable digital gift cards
  • Earnable reward points (Kicks) in-store and online
  1. Speedy checkout process

How many times have you abandoned apps that are taking too long for something as simple as checkout? This brings us to the point of a faster checkout process.

An ideal app should not take more than a few seconds for the checkout process. According to Forbes, transactions with fewer forms have a higher completion percentage.

With a faster checkout process, you are creating an opportunity for a better competitive advantage. This also makes mobiles apps more preferred than their desktop counterparts.

A faster checkout can also be achieved for the customers who are willing to share their information with you and drastically improve their customer experience.

  1. Mobile Optimized Product Descriptions

Desktops have a higher screen ratio, which means there is more space for you to share your product description. But, for the mobile application, you need to be creative because of the screen constraints.

Mobile optimized descriptions tend to have a higher engagement rate, which helps you to sell more. So, if your product has lengthy paragraphs, it makes the user less interested in buying it.

You can analyze existing descriptions and optimize them as per the mobile screen constraint. Focus on highlighting the crucial information that can be beneficial in producing a higher conversion rate.

  1. Mobile Optimized Product Images

One of the most significant disadvantages of any commerce app is the product’s lack of touch and feel. However, this shortcoming is overcome by using high-quality images for the product.

High-quality images often take a lot of data, which affects the page loading time and sometimes renders it unresponsive. This can be easily managed by using images optimized for the mCommerce platform.

You can also use augmented reality to showcase your product in three dimensions giving the customers a better understanding. You need to include multiple mobile-optimized images from as many angles as possible.

  1. Simpler Returns

Returns are bound to happen, and not having a proper return policy will hamper the customer experience and lower customers’ interest.

92% of consumers surveyed said that they would buy again if the product return process is easy, whereas 79% of consumers want free return shipping- Invespcro

The above stats clearly show that an adequate return policy will drive more customers to your mCommerce app. However, this also indicates a higher probability of cart abandonment if you do not have better return policies in place.

Returns should be trackable, and the user should be kept in the loop throughout the process. Adding returns and return tracking has been included in every mCommerce app development roadmap for some time now.

Conclusion 

If you create a mobile application for your eCommerce website while keeping all the above points in mind, you will get a product that is a market-ready digital product that will be used and loved by customers instantly. This will also help create a loyal customer base and promote your online business to newer ones.

A high-quality shopping experience is the most significant factor. So you need to create a well-thought series of experiences you want your customer to enjoy while shopping with your mCommerce app. I hope this article successfully explored and explained every feature your mCommerce app requires to create an awesome customer experience.


Himanshu SinghAuthor bio: 

Name: Himanshu Singh is a Marketing consultant at Rapidops. He is well versed in digital product development and likes to write about end-to-end application development. For the times he is not working, he enjoys reading books and listing to some music.

7 Must-Have Features for Every Mobile Commerce App

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