Online stores have become the definition of convenience in terms of shopping. Most businesses have found e-commerce stores helpful in reaching a wider customer base and increasing sales.
Key Takeaways
- Launching both an e-commerce website and app combo offers wider customer reach, catering to 78% of app users and 22% of website users.
- The combo increases customer engagement through personalized experiences, push notifications, and desktop-friendly product viewing.
- Higher conversion rates are achieved by combining trust indicators on websites with in-app chat support.
- Improved customer service is provided through website FAQs and easy in-app returns and replacements.
- Brand loyalty is enhanced through consistent branding, loyalty programs, and personalized offers across both platforms.
- The combo leads to increased sales and revenue through wider reach and cross-promotion opportunities.
- Building both a website and app together can be more cost-effective than developing them separately.
According to Tidio, 27% of people prefer online shopping over offline shopping, which is 2.14 billion. Such stats have inspired businesses to turn towards creating their online stores for selling products. However, some businesses either create an e-commerce website or an e-commerce app, which may be a big mistake because we think that both are important. Let’s know the advantages of launching or having an e-commerce website and app combo.
1. Wider Customer Reach
According to Techosquare, 78% of customers prefer shopping in an e-commerce app over an e-commerce website, and the rest 22% are comfortable with websites. Seeing the number of online shoppers avoiding any of these may keep your business away from the attention of millions of customers.
Both e-commerce websites and mobile apps have their own advantages. Where mobile apps offer incredible accessibility and convenience on smartphones and tablets, websites can look great on desktops. E-commerce websites can also made compatible with mobile devices with the help of responsive website templates for e-commerce.
By focusing on both the website and mobile app, you can provide an impressive online shopping experience to your customers regardless of their preferred devices. This may also help you with increased sales, which we’ll discuss later.
2. Increased Customer Engagement
E-commerce mobile apps excel in providing a personalized user experience with features like push notifications, location-based offers, etc, while e-commerce websites can excel in the same by recommendations with the help of a user’s browser history, purchase history, and preferences. Also, e-commerce websites are considered better for viewing and judging listed products when used on desktops. Lacking any of them may negatively impact customer engagement, which may also affect your business.
By providing a personalized shopping experience, you can provide customers with an immersive and engaging way of exploring products. This can impress customers with an amazing shopping experience, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
3. Higher Conversion Rates
The best part of e-commerce websites is they can be operated on both smartphones and desktops. You can display trust indicators like customer reviews, security badges, and return policies to build trust and credibility, which may not be done on an e-commerce app. However, it can be ideal for providing in-app chat support. Both trust indicators and chat support cannot be compromised. With such features, businesses can help customers in trustworthy decision-making when making a purchase, helping them increase conversion rates.
4. Improved Customer Services
With features like customer support and FAQs, businesses can assist customers through an e-commerce website. While an in-app support system can provide customers with easy returns or replacements, backed by easy-to-access live status and relevant push notifications. With the help of such features and of course, the e-commerce app and website combo, you can improve your customer services and make your customers find your services reliable, especially when they’re concerned about making a purchase online from your platform.
5. Improved Brand Loyalty
If you own both an e-commerce app and a website, then you can easily focus on aspects like consistent branding. By maintaining consistent branding through logo, color scheme, and messaging, businesses can easily create a unique identity for their online store among customers.
With e-commerce websites, you can offer tiered loyalty programs to incentivize customers based on their spending (personalized discounts), recommend personalized offers, integrate e-mail marketing campaigns, and integrate social media platforms.
On the other hand, with e-commerce apps, you can add elements like badges, points, and leaderboards to increase excitement. You can also use push notifications to notify customers about loyalty program benefits and the latest offers. E-commerce apps are also considered ideal to offer referral bonuses.
With the combination of personalized discounts, offers, effective and non-torturing e-mail marketing, loyalty program benefits, latest offer notifications, and referral bonuses, you can create customers who can be loyal to your brand and prioritize your platform whenever making a purchase. This can help you with better and smoother customer retention.
6. Increased Sales & Revenue
Wider customer reach, increased engagement, higher conversions, improved services, and improved brand loyalty help you increase your brand’s sales and revenue. Also, with the e-commerce website and app combo, you can easily serve 78% of online buyers who prefer online shopping apps and the rest 22% who are fine with e-commerce websites.
Considering the marketing point of view, both website and app can be used to promote each other, which is known as cross-promotion. With this marketing strategy, you can encourage your visitors or customers to explore both, which can also be helpful in increasing brand awareness and gaining traffic on both platforms.
7. Cost-Effective Solution
For businesses, everything comes to an end when we discuss costs. In the beginning, businesses might be struggling with the budget, so they might decide to build any one of them. However, businesses may look for combo offers that may offer some discounts for building an e-commerce app and a website.
Businesses can also look for some readymade solutions like e-commerce website templates with apps, coming with a ready-to-launch online store. If you end up building an e-commerce website only, you may be required to build an app in the future, and vice-versa, which may be costly in the long term. Basically, building an e-commerce app and a website solution can be cost-effective if businesses can do both in a single attempt.
How to Create an E-Commerce Store App & Website Combo?
Build Them From Scratch
You can opt to build an e-commerce website and app from scratch, but it may be too expensive and time-consuming because it goes through multiple layers before completion. Several days spent on design, development, and testing may slow down your time to market and you may end up spending thousands of dollars.
Pros
- High accuracy
- Custom solution
Cons
- Expensive
- Time-consuming
- Slower time to market
Get MallBit’s Cost-Effective E-Commerce Store Template and App Solution
You can also get MallBit’s e-commerce website template and app solution to speed up your time to market. Also, it is a cost-effective solution as it comes for a few hundred dollars. This e-commerce store template comes with user-side development, while the app comes with complete development, reducing your efforts and speeding up your online store launch.
Pros
- Cost-effective
- Ready-to-use
- Faster time to market
- Coding-free solution
- Customizable
Generally, e-commerce store templates and app scripts fall behind only in customizations, but this isn’t the case with MallBit as it offers a fully customizable solution to let businesses make changes to the app and website according to brand requirements
Conclusion
Primarily, the e-commerce website and app combo helps you reach a wider audience. Also, building them both together can be a cost-effective solution. Solutions like MallBit’s e-commerce website template and clone script provide a cost-effective, ready-to-use, and code-free solution to build an online store, which can be a more affordable alternative to custom e-commerce app and web development, considering the advantages of the e-commerce app and website combo discussed above. However, you must understand the market to earn recognizable success, offering competitive prices and providing reliable services are keys to successful e-commerce stores.
