Mobile commerce is now around 10% of all online commerce in the UK – and growing. So it is obviously an important thing to get right. I am sometimes asked whether retail businesses are better off with a website that works well on a mobile device or with an mobile app that has been specially written to work on a particular type of phone.
It’s not an easy question to answer.
The first thing many people think of is the fact that, if you decide to go down the mobile app route, then you will need to create several different apps. Android and Apple’s iOS are battling it out and have a roughly equal share of the UK market. So you should certainly create at least two apps – one for Apple phones and one for Android phones – and more than two if you want to reach people with Windows and Blackberry phones.
In contrast, choose a mobile website and you just need to create a single version and (in theory at least) it will work on any type of smartphone. And that should be lot cheaper. A lot of people would say that the lower development cost is the only advantage of going with a mobile website and that the advantages of mobile apps outweigh that.
These advantages are mainly about the user experience. If you build an app you can take advantage of all those smart things that smartphones can deliver and users expect – like “pinching” content to change its size. And it’s undeniable that apps deliver complex data like video more rapidly that the mobile web does.
And you can (or at least should be able to) use a mobile app when you are in an area of no connectivity as apps can cache themselves on smartphones. This allows users to get access to your content even when they are not connected. That’s an important consideration even for smartphone users in the middle of London where data speeds can make web browsing on a mobile device tedious.
But that’s really where it stops. Some people argue that apps have better security. And in some ways they do – but as UK consumers are generally happy with the security of websites that’s hardly a factor.
Then there’s monetisation. Apple apps have a 30% higher conversion rate than mobile websites (they convert better than Android apps as well). But at a cost: Apple takes up to 30% of revenues. Build a mobile website and Apple doesn’t get a sniff of your money.
And there’s discoverability. Any successful e-commerce organisation will have developed profitable ways of using the web to tell people about its products – chiefly through search marketing. The opportunities to use search marketing to promote products in the Apple App Store and Google’s Play Store simply aren’t as sophisticated. So it is very easy for your app to remain hidden among the hundreds of thousands of other apps.
So which should a retailer choose: mobile website or mobile app? The ideal solution of course is to have both. But if that isn’t an option, then in my view a mobile website wins on development cost, discoverability and monetisation while apps win on the user experience. So the right choice will depend on what you want to achieve: for someone wishing to deliver a rich user experience (games, films etc) then the mobile app is probably the best option. But for a retailer wishing to offer access to goods to a mobile consumer then the mobile website is probably the way to go.
Of course there is always the “hybrid” option. But that is something for another time…
Jeremy Swinfen Green's YabaDabaDoo 