Importance of Mobile Apps
Nov 19th, 2012 by Siew Ying
Larry Summers came to Sauder and gave us a talk yesterday on the economic trend of the world now; he started the talk by mentioning the importance of smartphone.
If you were to give me access to Harvard Library, one of the largest university library in the world but no access at all to my smartphone. OR. Access to my smartphone and no access to the Harvard Library. I would choose the latter, because smartphones can do everything. A smartphone has more computing power than the Apollo program had that sent a man to the moon.
That’s what Dr. Summers mentioned at the beginning of his speech. Nowadays, people use their phones for many functions such as making a payment and do mobile shopping. My Marketing Applications Professor Ann Stone mentioned before that she prefers Linkedin Mobile just because it is so much easier to view and navigate.
With the holiday season approaching, Mashable has identified a trend of mobile shopping, Thanksgiving mobile shopping will double this year. With the mobile shopping trend, retailers are getting on the track of offering mobile shopping to consumers. One of my favourite fashion mobile app is ASOS.
The reason why I love this app is:
1.) Ease of Navigation – My friend recommended ASOS to me last year with its mobile app and guess what? I spent two hours browsing on the clothes and accessories on my iPhone. It is so easy to navigate and I say it is very interactive. There’s no lag page when I browsed through the items one by one. This simple and fast shopping way made me enjoy it so much. It is even easier than shopping on their website. The screen size is just nice for a piece of clothing, compared to shopping on a laptop, I prefer the mobile version more.
2.) Wishlist and Saved Items – Consumers often have a wishlist for certain products especially in clothing or cosmetics. They do not purchase on the spot and prefer to wait longer maybe when the price is lower. This app integrates this idea so well that they have a saved section where you can save it and come back to check on it later. I tried it on their webpage and items that I saved normally are gone due to some issues of my different IP addresses. Shopping on mobile made me interact with the page more.
3.) Fast and Secured Payment – Payments are easy to be made, you can enter your credit card information and it will be stored on the app for your second and future payments.
4.) Store Locations Map (for UK only) – We can search for key stores that accept returns in UK and this is convenient for consumers because they do not have to go on Google Maps separately to search for one.
ASOS is smart to build a comprehensive mobile shopping app because it keeps consumers engage and attention on their smartphones. Thus, bounce rate is much lower compared to shopping on their website. This ASOS app has all you need for an awesome mobile shopping experience. Do your favorite mobile apps beat mine?