When was the last time you did something unique with your online store? In many ways, mobile commerce shares much in common with its familiar counterpart e-commerce. In both cases, customers go online to buy your products and services. The basic division is that all e-commerce shopping happens exclusively through handheld devices, like smartphones and tablets. Although both are equipped with online consumers, the actual shopping experience is very different. As such, you must have complementary strategies for each of these retail verticals.
Innovation involves taking a risk. It is more than changing a button color or adding an image or promotion.
Here are some ideas that have the potential to reinvent your E-commerce marketing:
1. Geo-Targeting:
E-commerce customers typically shop remotely from desktop or laptop computers, placing orders online and waiting several days for delivery.By contrast, smartphones are portable devices with built-in GPS tracking:
- As a merchant, this means you can use geo-targeting technology to “push” coupons, promotions, and recommendations to nearby shoppers.
- As a user, this means you can browse and pay before visiting the closet brick and mortar store to pick up your purchase.
2. User Identification:
E-commerce is largely anonymous- until a customer voluntarily supplies his or her payment details during checkout.Not so with m-commerce.
In addition to knowing the whereabouts of customers, mobile technology allows you to collect information like each user’s identity and shopping habits.
As a result, m-commerce is ideally suited for loyalty programs designed to boost customer engagement. The more you know about each user, the easier it becomes to tailor the shopping experience to his or her individual preferences.
3. Dedicated Apps:
The primary storefront in e-commerce is the website. Search engine optimization (SEO) is foundational to any long-term eCommerce development services.
4. Data Security:
Purchases made through mobile devices are often more secure than those made through PCs, since:- Payment data must be pre-loaded into the user’s smartphone before purchasing.
- The mobile device must be unlocked, often with a password, PIN, or biometric verification.
- The user must access his or her stored payment data
- The customer must manually initiate the purchase, sometimes with a second authorization step.
There are also many privacy concerns surrounding personal data and consumer behaviour. As E-commerce mobile app developers make it so easy to collect this information, how you use and store this data becomes even more important.
Data security must become a top priority in your business to ensure that your customers enjoy the safest shopping experience possible.
5. Page Load Speed:
Having a website is important no matter how your customers choose to interface with your online store.Yet when shopping through mobile devices, page load speed is especially important. That’s because smartphones and tablets often have slower connections and less robust hardware than their PC counterparts.
To make matters worse, smartphone users are notoriously impatient. An estimated 53% of mobile visitors will abandon a site if it takes three or more seconds to load.
There’s not a lot of wiggle room, so do everything you can to improve your site's page load speed.