As anyone who is involved in the world of e-commerce knows, it’s a tough industry. You have to deal with a variety of external forces that aren’t necessarily going to work in your favor. You face competition from the entire Internet, competing with businesses all over the world who offer the same products that you do. And if you do break through all the noise and get someone to shop with you, they might be shopping from a desktop, phone or tablet. Then you have to make sure that no matter what device they’re on, they have a great shopping experience. If they don’t, that might very well be the only time that they shop with you.
How do you deal with these challenges? You make an app!
An app that only lets people shop for your products, how glorious! I know what you’re thinking, that sounds like an expensive endeavor. And yes, while developing your own app isn’t cheap, it is well worth the investment. An app gives you a kind of “walled garden” where you can control every aspect of the shopping experience and the only competition that you face is from your other products.
We helped one of our customers develop an app where customers could buy a variety of their different product lines, and the results the app has produced for them have been fantastic! Take a look:
- App revenue is 20% of the total mobile revenue and is 8% of the total online revenue.
- App revenue grew at a rate of +155% YoY while Desktop grew at +63% and non-app mobile grew +85%.
So the app is doing great things. But since we are all about continued improvement, we took a deep dive into the data to gather insights about the apps performance and find out how we could make it even better. To our surprise, we noticed that the app’s performance was impacted by the type of phone (iPhone or Android) that they were using to access the app. We found that:
- While Apple users account for only 25% of the installs, Apple they are more likely to use the app, order, and have a higher order value than an Android user.
- Average order value (AOV) is 18.2% higher for Apple users via the app while Android users AOV is slightly lower at -0.4% compared to just using the standard mobile site.
Why does the type of phone a customer is using have such a significant impact on the app’s performance? We have few possible explanations that we are exploring, so stay tuned!
But the data tells us one thing for certain, and it’s that having a customized app can greatly increase mobile sales. So it’s crucial that the app provides customers with a superb experience, no matter what type of phone they are using. Happy users = more sales and more sales = happy clients!
Want to learn more about MINDSCAPE and some of the other methods that we use to produce results for our clients? Come to one of our upcoming Lunch and Learn events! Click the button below to learn more!
