Report: Mobile shopping grows, app usage varies
Vancouver, British Columbia -- Mobile shopping continues to grow at a rapid pace, with an increasing number of mobile shoppers embracing Internet retailer apps, social shopping apps, and brick-and-mortar retail apps to enhance their shopping experience. However, new research prepared by Yankee Group for mobile analytics firm Mobdia Technology shows usage of these apps varies widely depending on many factors, including the type and quality of the mobile app.
Social shopping applications such as Shopkick and Groupon drove the highest level of application engagement at 49%, while Internet retailers such as Amazon and eBay followed closely with 47%. Traditional brick-and-mortar retailers such as Walmart and Kohl's trailed with 43%, but had the largest distribution of engagement results with some companies well above the average.
Apps offering customer services to enhance the mobile shopping experience drove more engagement. For example, Kohl's and H&M engagement, at 73% and 61% respectively, was higher than most apps in all segments. The apps for both of these companies offer features other than just purchasing options, such as inventory checks, rewards, and look books.
The impact of app quality and experience is also apparent when engagement is reviewed on an OS basis. Many mobile apps in this study offer different experiences and qualities in their Android and iOS versions and the engagement metric results clearly show iOS apps benefiting from better applications.
"Mobile shopping is all about mobile applications and the data clearly shows the correlation between high app quality with enhanced user experiences and higher shopper engagement and usage," said Sheryl Kingstone, director of enterprise services at Yankee Group. "Retailers that want to drive more engagement with mobile shoppers need to understand what apps are being used, not just downloaded, and the features of those apps that are driving the increased usage. Tracking and measuring these metrics on a regular basis and benchmarking the results to the competition is key to a retailer's success"