Is E-Commerce's Mobile App-etite Growing?

From the ecommerce industry standpoint, reaching out to the target audience and making the data accessible to the business owners and stakeholders is very important.

The relevance largely matters on how disruptive it is from a technology perspective.

Mobility provides customers and other stakeholders an anytime anywhere environment for accessing and analysing data. That’s the reason now, most E-Commerce Companies are now investing heavily both on mobile app development and cultural transformation of consumers as they expect most transactions to happen out of the mobile device.

Amit Shukla, CIO and Co-Founder, Koovs.com says, “From technology stand point it creates a new challenge to provide a secure and high speed data transfer with a better user experience. To meet the trend extra amount of time and money is involved which was not required before but ROI for this is going to be good as the marketing is booming with this new technology. Business owners enjoy ease of access as all the reporting and monitoring is available for them on multiple platforms and on mobile devices.”

From the customers standpoint, this provides users with multiple options and devices for accessing the product offering.

Mobility Strategies  

The mobile strategy that Koovs follows for enterprise mobility is surrounded on certain key points:

1.    Better user experience and usability
2.    Ease of accessibility for business users and customers
3.    Display maximum information in the available space.
4.    Keeping user updated about the latest trends and changes.
5.    Providing a secure environment “On the Go”.

Amit Shukla, Founder, Chief Technology Officer says, “Essentially, we want to have a high availability across various platforms and we have already achieved most of the goals by using the solutions like Cassandra/HBase.”

Mrinal Chatterjee, CIO, Shopclues.com says, “Mobility is not just about building an application or creating a mobile optimised website. It is much more – as we have more metrics to track how many downloads are happening, how many uninstalls are taking place and so on. In the traditional web world, none of those metrics had ever existed.”

Shukla says, “In continuation with our effort in mobility we are very soon going to launch Android and iPhone apps for our customers to provide them a better user experience, and already we provide a mobile compatible view of our application that is supported on wide range of Android, IOS and Windows devices giving ease of access to our audience.”

Chatterjee adds, “Ever since we launched it we have seen a very significant improvement in the trend, conversions are looking very healthy, consumer engagement is looking very healthy, and the most important trend is: the uptake of mobility in tier-II and tier- III cities seems to be growing much faster. People in tier-II and tier-III cities may not have proper internet connection at home on laptops or desktops but they use mobile to access the internet.”

Challenges

Shopclues is a data intense company, which completely focuses on such metrics. It has been keeping up with the mobility pace and also about trying to catch up fast with the rapidly changing trends in mobile space.

Chatterjee says that there is a delay in adoption.

He says, “The delay is not because – we could not build a mobile optimised site or an app. ShopClues is fundamentally trying to understand which metrics we need to track… whether they should be the same metrics, same measurements or do they need to be different? ShopClues uses its own data analytics platform, so there is a need to incorporate some of those changes – and then we will launch our own mobile site and our app.”

Banks still seem to be lagging behind. There are many banking portals where net banking option does not work on mobile browsers. So, banks are losing out on online transactions – just because they do not work on mobile browser or Android browser.

Citing an example, Chatterjee explains, “A simple example is verified by VISA, the page where you have to do a fiddle around to get all buttons. It’s not mobile optimised. Many such companies of the world are making some improvements – but again they are limited to what the banks are doing.”

The challenging part is once the customer goes to a banking site to complete the transaction using the mobile browser, many drop-offs take place there – as either the bank page does not open or it is not a mobile optimised one (buttons are not visible). It happens across most of the banks.

Elaborating Challenges, Shukla says:

Mobility comes with certain key challenges that needs to answered:

• Internet speed and connectivity on customer’s cell phones as the internet speed is not that high in India.
• Device compatible view and usability.
• Secure payment options, still a segment of people are not comfortable in making online purchase as they don’t consider it secure.
• Meeting the delivery timelines, as the competition is increasing timely delivery of order is important.

Benefits

Thirty to thirty five per cent of Shopclues’s traffic come from mobile and generating about 25 to 30 per cent of our revenues from mobile. An year back, the revenue was under five per cent. ShopClues launched mobile optimised site and apps about six months ago. So, in Jan-14, we were hovering around 10 to12 per cent. We are seeing a very healthy growth on mobile site.

There are multiple benefits in terms of customers and business functions :

1.    Fast reporting and monitoring on the fly.
2.    New request handling.
3.    Increased option of accessibility for customers.
4.    Better understanding of user behaviour on the portal.
5.    Increased Revenue.

Inputs from Mastufa Ahmed

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