Skip to main content

Mobile Apps: Don’t get left behind…

10th Feb 2015

Smart phones are now fully assimilated into everyday culture – it’s no passing fad. Pretty much everyone’s got one in the UK, (and most of Europe and the US), including a very large majority of your customers, and that’s why you need to make sure you’ve got all bases covered when it comes to using this crucial platform. 

If you haven’t considered having a mobile app for your business, consider it now. Your daily operational activities have to have some shared ground with your audience, most of who will be used to accessing all sorts of information using their mobiles on the move.

If you have an ecommerce website, there is one specific statistic which should give you more than pause for thought: According to data taken from over 100,000 ecommerce stores last August, 50.3% of traffic was coming from mobile, beating the 49.7% from computers. As this data is now almost six months old and there has been a rise in sales of tablet devices since, you can take it that that figure has increased rather than decreased in the time that has passed since it was first raised. So, if over half the time shoppers shop online they do it via a tablet or a mobile, it’s time to stop and think.

Consumers are becoming more and more comfortable using their smart phones to make purchases. It’s been a slow burn – research has indicated that the existing trend had been to research purchases via a tablet device and then complete them accessing the seller’s website using a computer (still a popular method of purchase) but this is slowly changing and shoppers are now increasingly likely to purchase using their phones.

Once you absorb the fact that the majority of your intended audience are using smart phones and tablets the key question is then, ‘how?’ How are mobile users spending their media time? The answer to this question should then govern the decision-making when it comes to developing the mobile app. If over half of your traffic is coming via mobile, would your sales be positively impacted by the availability of an app?

For the last couple of years, app usage has been proven to dominate browser usage with figures showing that almost 90 per cent of mobile media time is now via apps. This is because mobile apps are able to make full use of their host devices functions and features and so generally provide a better user experience than that that can be found on a mobile website.