If you’ve been doing any online shopping recently, you’d know that nowadays, a typical shopping experience involves a multitude of devices, with mobile device being the most common. The explosion of the mCommerce scene which has revenue and traffics far surpass that of brick and mortar stores.
The growing importance of mCommerce
With a growing number of approximately 7 billion mobile users worldwide , the m-Commerce scene is expected to be the main focus for retailers everywhere.
mCommerce’s impact on the eCommerce world
The first few mobile initiatives from bigger brands have fundamentally changed the eCommerce world for the better, with a shift towards on-the-go shopping and customer convenience. According to Statista, the worldwide mCommerce share in eCommerce is expected to reach 72.9% globally in 2021—that’s a lot. Just a few years ago, mCommerce couldn’t even take up one third of eCommerce and now it’s projected to be the main purchasing channel for shoppers everywhere.
With an average year-on-year growth of 33.8%, it’s undeniable the m-Commerce is only getting ever more popular—especially when as much as 87% of shoppers feel the need to engage in online product search before buying.
mCommerce’s impact on our daily lives
With mCommerce, the typical shopping experience is no longer a long and tiring process. Instead, now it’s personalized—more adaptive to your needs and your location to bring you the best possible products. The benefits of mCommerce aren’t only limited to online uses. Recent integrations of new technologies have made mobile an essential companion for brick and mortar store shoppers as well.
For shoppers, the benefits of mCommerce seem to be endless as we have yet to know the full spectrum of its capability. But one thing for sure is that shopping via mobile is set to revolutionize your typical purchasing experience.
Mobile as an intermediary touch in the shopping experience
Mobile is currently the intermediary touch in the shopping experience. What this means is that shoppers are using mobile more frequently in-between stages of their buying journey. This makes mCommerce an essential part for every eCommerce operation:
This fact might seem trivial at first, but it’s the reason that we’re currently seeing big brands integrating omnichannel experience into their shopping applications. Omnichannel strategy is a new must-have for stores who don’t want to stay behind the trend.
Omnichannel and why the future is mobile
Shoppers of today’s world have expectations far different from that of the pre-smartphone era, and this means an entirely new definition of success for eCommerce stores. In the current climate, retail marketing success means reaching shoppers whenever and wherever—on whichever device they may be using.
How brands are making omnichannel experience a must in the mCommerce world
Off the top of our head, the one brand that‘s revolutionized their shopping experience is Nike—your famous sports footwear. Nike realized the demand for seamless integration of mobile shopping apps and brick and mortar stores. They developed their own Nike App to enhance physical store-browsing experience. Their app is the prime example of omnichannel experience.
Nike App can do everything you want it to and more. It can automatically recognize shoppers as soon as they step foot in a store; the app also allows for features such as checking, scanning of product availability, and checking out without ever having to wait in line.
The omnichannel experience brought by apps such as this, without a doubt, is set to be transformative to the majority of shoppers everywhere, and its potential is yet to be properly realized.
“The digital opportunity alone is tremendous. But just as promising is how digital and physical environments are intersecting and amplify each other. Our most effective test case thus far has been the Nike App at Retail, which links features of the Nike app to our physical retail experiences.” — Mark Parkers, NIKE’s CEO
Progressive Web App for an omnichannel approach
It’s only recently that we’re seeing a kind of mass migration from native mobile applications to Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in the mCommerce sphere, and that’s something worth noticing if you’re into improving your store’s bottom line.
PWA is an emerging trend among the first adopters. Developed by Google, the technology itself is aimed at providing you with a seamless, app-like experience. Essentially, PWAs are webpages with the appearance and functionality of native applications. This is impressive considering that many of the features that are lacking in today’s native applications such as Offline Capability or SEO are on the web. The reason that brands are now choosing PWA is that shoppers don’t want apps—they want features of an app. And if there’s an app-like webpage that has all the best qualities from an app, while remaining light and fast, there’s no reason not to install one.
With all this information taken into account, it can be worth it for your business to go for a PWA solution and enjoy the many omnichannel benefits that it offers. In fact, it’s high time that retail brands invested in a PWA-powered storefront, considering that it is the number one sought-after approach right now. And especially for mobile shoppers who prefer smooth-flowing customer experiences, PWA is the ideal choice as it offers better performance and seamless customer experience thanks to service worker eliminating the need for page re-rendering. The connection-independence nature of PWA also means that your website will still appear functional even when your customers are without a connection.
Omnichannel is set to be the new norm in mobile shopping experience
At this rate, omnichannel will be the new normal very soon—and it’s up to adopters such as yourself to decide whether to go forward with the trend, or swim against it and face losses in customer satisfaction as a result.
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