The three big app commerce trends for 2016

As the year comes to a close and after looking back at the main highlights in 2015, these are the three main app commerce trends we predict for 2016.

1. Loyalty goes omnichannel

The most innovative retailers digitise their loyalty, making it possible to reward shoppers automatically for interactions with their brand at every touchpoint: online, in-store, and simply everywhere on their mobile devices. Thanks to this, the success of a loyalty scheme no longer has to depend on whether or not the customer presents a physical loyalty card at the till.

The benefits of loyalty go beyond being able to reward and learn about customers. House of Fraser’s app success has shown that the more channels a customer shops from, the more valuable he or she becomes to the retailer. And digitised loyalty provides a big incentive for shoppers to interact with a brand on multiple channels.

The next step involves integrating the digitised loyalty scheme into a transactional shopping app, meaning that retailers can attribute behaviour and sales to the right channels while also attaining a single customer view.

In 2015, a handful of innovative retailers digitised their loyalty schemes. We expect this to become common practice in 2016.

2. Smartphones will outperform tablets

We have started seeing smartphones continually drive higher revenue than tablets.When we took a look across retailers on the Poq platform, we saw that website revenue generated by smartphones was twice as high as website revenue generated by tablets in Q3.

This difference was even more pronounced for apps. Across our platform smartphones generated over five times as much revenue via apps than tablets did.

The yearly growth for sales transacted via tablets has also been slowing. As reported by Internet Retailing, sales via tablets grew a mere 12% year-on-year this November — even though online retail sales saw their biggest ever growth in November, with sales via smartphones growing by a phenomenal 97%.

That’s a sign that no retailer can afford to ignore. As great mobile experiences and high-performing retail apps become an industry norm, customers will opt to shop from their phones.

3. App launches will skyrocket

It has become quite commonplace for the industry to predict that a coming year will be “the year of mobile.” While it is certainly true that shoppers have already taken to mobile, our research collaboration with Internet Retailing found that only 18% of the UK’s leading 500 retailers actually offered a fully functional transactional shopping app at the beginning of 2015. On Black Friday, shoppers were flocking to apps to do their shopping — if the retailer in question offered one.

2016 will be the year of retail apps. Many of the UK’s top retailers who have yet to launch a transactional app will do so within the next 12 months. At Poq we are looking forward to playing a major role in making this happen.

We wish you happy holidays and a great start to the new year!