Mobile website optimisation vs Mobile e-commerce app.

Ben Goodenough
Aug 23, 2017 · 6 min read

So the big question is: Do I optimise my e-commerce site for a mobile experience saving money upfront or do I set out to build a native mobile app for my customers or …. do I do both?


The answer really depends on your business, but more importantly your customers! Knowing your customer preferences and habits is essential prior to, and when making, any decision around the growth of your business and how you allocate and spend your budget.


Let’s get into the pros and cons of each solution. I’m going to list out the key points to consider if you are at this cross road in your business or if you can see it on the horizon.

  1. Budget
credit image source: giphy.com

This is probably the most obvious first point to consider when deciding to develop something.

When you think about cost, you also need to consider staff resource. What type of skills will be required to fulfil either decision made? Do you have those skills in house? It’s fair to assume that if you own a small e-commerce store that utilises the power of an e-commerce solution such as Shopify, you probably won’t have had a need up until now to consider hiring a full stack or backend developer for server side logic. There’s the need for a Front End Mobile Developer, Graphic Designer and Project Manager. You can see where I’m going with this — building a mobile app can quickly become expensive even if you outsource. On the flipside, getting the time of a good e-commerce Consultant to look over your customers journey and suggest amendments to be made could save you thousands of pounds and a lot of time!

Score : Optimization 1, Mobile app 0

2. ROI

credit image source: giphy.com

Let’s presume you do have the budget and/or the internal staff resource — the next thing you need to determine is the projected ROI of either solution, as there is no point doing anything if you can’t predict a quantifiable result. Try not to focus on beauty metrics here such as app downloads or website visits, you need to define three to five key metrics that drive your businesses growth and success; for example: actual sales, other revenue streams such as advertisement, number of daily active users — essentially think about customer actions that translate into money in the bank or company growth.

OK, so you know what you’re measuring, how do you predict the future? Simple answer — you can’t, but you can make an educated guess as to how long it would take you to see an ROI dependent on which path you take which will give you a clearer picture as to whether you have the on-going cash flow to support your new app. Focusing on the actual sales metric, as an example, let’s say your app costs £20k -30k (I’m being optimistic here!), and you sell products on average for £50 with a margin of around 5% — you would have to process over 10,000 orders through your app alone before you start seeing profit from it. It’s a volumes game.

Score : Optimization 2, Mobile app 0

3. The download hurdle

So, you’ve crunched the numbers and you can see that having an app is achievable, you have the cash flow to support the development and marketing of your new app so next comes the biggest hurdle of all — getting users to download your app! This may sound like it’s going to be another pro-optimisation point but it’s not! This really does depend on your customer base, and more importantly, their behaviour when they interact with your site. Condensing any process and saving people's time is always a winner. If your business sells stuff that people purchase on a regular basis, websites, no matter how optimised, will never outperform the slick feel of checking out on an app.

On the flipside, if you see that most of your customer base is made up of new visitors, getting them to download an app is just not going to happen. This is extremely apparent when you look at clothing brands as people usually tend to shop from the same brands over and over, so it makes sense the retailer would offer their customer base an app. However, a business that sells car parts for example is likely to find it difficult to entice people to use up space on their device considering most of us either rely on a mechanic to buy car parts or make just a few purchases a year. Another huge consideration is — do you have a large enough audience and customer base to obtain the number of downloads you will need?

How can I get people to download my app? That’s another article altogether, so keep your eyes peeled.

Score : Optimization 2, Mobile app 1

4. Social media to checkout experience

credit image source: giphy.com

Social media is one of the fastest growing sales channels but I bet you already knew that. Keeping that in mind, it’s important to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. If you see something advertised in a social media post do you really want to be re-directed to a website? On the counter — do you want to be re-directed to an app? — this would mean re-direction to a website then a user hitting the ‘Open in app’ CTA usually located at the header of the page. After all, you were just enjoying your social feed of fake news and funny videos! Seriously, this does depend on you doing some research on your customer base, for example, if they live and breathe Instagram and/or Snapchat, there is a nifty call to action called ‘swipe up’. Swipe up allows a webpage to be displayed within the app and it feels pretty natural to the user, however, if they are on Facebook or YouTube, they must follow a link and be re-directed to a webpage. Either way the only current way of driving sales via social media is by re-direction to a webpage …… that is until PayFlic is launched… wink, wink, cough, cough >> https:payflic.com . Anyway, enough plugs, back on topic! Best option on social media is to make your mobile web experience as optimal as possible. It’s one thing to be re-directed to a browser within a social media app, its another to have a whole other app opened.

Score : Optimization 3, Mobile app 1

In summary, unless you have a large enough base of recurring customers, strong brand awareness and deep pockets, creating an app would not be suitable for your business. Just getting users to download an app is another marketing campaign altogether. Stick to the principals of keeping your business infrastructure lightweight and optimise your customers journey.

There’s a bunch of e-commerce rocks stars who I highly recommend at 10x factory that could help you out with this — it’s a premium slack channel. https://www.10xfactory.com/

Thank you for reading my article! There’s plenty more in the pipeline. be sure to follow me on medium and say hello on social media Facebook |Twitter | Instagram

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Ben Goodenough

Written by

My Kids, My Business, The hustle. CEO & Founder of @PayFlic_ltd. Growth hacker, Social commerce enthusiast.

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