Mobile App Mistakes That Are Often Overlooked by Businesses

eCommerce is moving towards an era where mobile eCommerce (mCommerce) might overtake traditional online shopping. eCommerce trends and consumer behavior in the last year suggest that mCommerce will cover more than 54% of eCommerce sales in 2021. Mobile apps have also become some of eCommerce’s major platforms where you can sell to unique customers who prefer the mobile app experience. Therefore, instead of only focusing on browser-based shopping for sales, you can also capitalize on mobile app shopping. This article will go through the 7 most common mobile app mistakes eCommerce businesses overlook.

Selling to customers through your eCommerce store mobile app can increase your conversion rate by three times. However, because this is new terrain for many eCommerce business owners, they often rush the process and end up struggling with low customer engagement. This is because they put out an app with poor design, low-quality images, incomplete catalogs, etc. But not to worry, this article will highlight seven of the top issues affecting your mobile app along with solutions.

Tiring Onboarding Process

App designers often get lost in their own sauce where they make an app that shows their design skills and only appeals to other designers. This results in a complex and time-consuming user experience for the actual users of the app, your customers. The registration process for users should be quick, simple, and straightforward. Your customers shouldn’t have to enter their details in multiple forms or go through many processes before they can use the app, or you will scare them away.

To make the registration simple and quick, do the following:

-Provide a social login feature that allows new users to link their Facebook, Google, Instagram, or Twitter and automatically complete the registration process.

-For email registration, ask only for their email ID and password for the signup process.

-You can skip this process but if you need their location details, set up a function that uses the user’s mobile device location data instead of asking them to fill a field to get their location.

-Lastly, users shouldn’t have to signup every time they open the app, which means users should remain logged in until they uninstall the app.

Long Payment Process

Another mistake business owners make with their mobile app is having a long checkout process. You don’t have to keep asking for the buyer’s credit/debit card information or shipping address every time they’re making a payment. In fact, your mobile app feature should autofill the buyer’s personal address as their shipping address, with an option to put a different shipping address. Sure, they should have an option to enter a new shipping address and credit/debit card each time they’re making a payment.

The key takeaway here is to avoid asking for unnecessary information from your customers at the checkout stage as it can kill their mood and make them abandon the cart. Additionally, store user data so that buyers won’t have to fill the same form repeatedly. Keep the checkout stage seamless and short and you will realize that more customers will go through with the payment.

Lack of Personalization

Remember we talked about how personalization makes marketing practices achieve better results? Personalization is like a cheat code that makes almost everything better; it also applies to mobile eCommerce as well. Personalization makes your mobile app experience appeal to each customer as though you’re targeting only them, and it can increase your sales by 20%.

How do you personalize the user experience on your mobile app? Make sure your app takes account of user needs in real-time. Save customer’s purchase history and recommend items based on that. Pay attention to their search queries on the app and send them targeted email notifications of the items they searched for as product recommendations. The key takeaway from this is to always make use of user data to provide a personalized experience for each customer.

Low-quality Images

Invest in high-quality product images; there’s no shortcut to this. Customers won’t see what a product truly looks like with pixelated blurry images, so make sure you take multiple high-quality images and multiple angles of each product. Another good practice is to take pictures of your product on a white background because it makes the product clear and shiny. You also want to make sure that your product images come in big sizes that show every detail on the product including tiny details. Remember to always add a zoom-in feature. For added advantage, take shots of your product while it’s being used by a person.

Poor Backend and Customer Support

Just as with other kinds of commerce, customer support is also important for mobile commerce. Therefore, don’t neglect your customers who are using your mobile app. Additionally, your mobile app shouldn’t crash when it receives high traffic. Buyers may ignore the first time your app crashes and a few more times even but they will soon realize that your backend support is weak or nonexistent and stop using your app.

Make sure you have a customer support team easily reachable to your customers and available 24hrs. Also, make sure you have a highly skillful backend support team that is always ready to manage your mobile app during incidents that may affect your mobile app negatively.

Poor Optimization of UI and UX

When you decide to build a mobile app, make sure you give the app designer enough time to do their work, which means building an app that optimizes the UI and UX. A good mobile app will be user-friendly, easy to navigate, and be designed to lead users towards the sales funnel. But the app designer can only keep these in mind when you don’t rush the process.

How to optimize your mobile app for UI and UX:

-Make sure your mobile app is compatible with multiple screen resolutions and mobile devices.

-Don’t clutter the app with irrelevant elements.

-Don’t congest your app with designs, rather use a minimalist design.

-Highlight only one CTA.

-Make sure the icons/buttons are easily clickable.

-Make sure navigation is fluid.

Neglecting Omnichannel Strategy

Modern buyers’ purchase journey is rarely straightforward, rather they use multiple channels and jump from one avenue to another before concluding the purchase. To make the most out of this new consumer behavior, you have to sync all of your sales channels to create one giant omnichannel. You get to manage all your customers, engage them, and collect data across different channels. An optimized cross-channel strategy will increase customer engagement and improve retention.

Over To You

Now, go back to the drawing board with this new information and improve your mobile app. It is important to take note of user feedback and market research in all your mobile app strategies.

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