Why Your Shopify Website needs a Mobile App?

A few years ago, a Shopify website was enough for every retailer to run their online store.

Then, it happened! The prominence of mobile commerce or m-commerce began to rise.

Globally, 53 percent of internet users shop online using their smartphones. And 64 percent of global mobile commerce orders come from iOS devices.

Today, the global app economy is growing from $1.31tn to $6.35tn between 2016 and 2022. In the wake of this new trend, your Shopify website needs a major companion.

It is yearning for an intuitive mobile app!

Reasons to Convert Your Shopify Store into A Mobile App

As you can see from the above graph, a user session comparison between the top 1000 mobile apps and mobile web properties proves the point. The session duration is significantly higher on mobile apps, showing that it’s the users’ favorite platform to shop.

While a website attracts new customers, a mobile app has the capability to retain loyal customers. Further, an intuitive mobile application grabs the attention of customers and gives them timely updates on the latest products (which can be very tempting many times!).

If your customer has been eyeing a product for a long time, then your mobile app highlights it to them, ultimately leading to a purchase.

What more reasons do you need to convert your Shopify store into a mobile app?

Here goes the list:

• A mobile app has better access to native features and is considered more flexible and easy to access.
• Mobile apps offer better multi-channel and user experiences.
• Mobile apps increase user engagement and conversion.
• Mobile apps promote more scope for loyalty programs.
• Mobile apps promote social sharing.
• Mobile apps build an on-going relationship between the customer and the seller.
• You can get deeper analytics data and customer behavior pattern analysis through mobile apps.
• As mobile app can reach a wider audience, it spreads the good word about your brand easily.

What are the challenges?

Now, you know the importance of converting your Shopify store into a mobile app. But is it that simple?

Well, it isn’t. Many times, we have faced our customers sharing some of their major concerns regarding this mobile commerce transformation. Despite knowing the advantages of having a mobile app for their Shopify website, they often lag behind because of these concerns.

Some of those are given below:

• They have recently started with the Shopify website.
• Their Shopify website is running well and so, they don’t want to scale up.
• They don’t have the resource and bandwidth.
• They are worried about the costs and time required for developing apps separately on both iOS and Android.
• They are concerned about the App Store and Play Store submission.
• They doubt if it can yield better results in terms of SEO.
• They expect instant results (high expectations!).

The list of concerns can be endless. Mobile apps offer a wide range of advantages to retail businesses. While that being said, a poor mobile experience is likely to turn off the users from visiting again.

In all cases, your choice of mobile platform and technology matter the most. If you want to focus on a single platform such as iOS or Android, then you can choose any niche technology such as Swift, Objective-C or Java etc. Whereas, if your need is to conquer a wider market segment with multiple presences, then the ultimate choice is to go with a cross-platform technology.

Our answer is always one of the evergreen tech — Flutter.

As a Flutter development company, SayOne is today one of the top-rated digital solutions providers (You can read our Clutch reviews here). Right from the beginning, we have been fascinated with Flutter and its benefits.

Today, a majority of our mobile app development solutions are running on this modern and reactive framework. You can further learn about our Flutter contribution from our GitHub Repo.

Flutter for Your Shopify Website

So, what is so special about Flutter? Can it address all these challenges?

Yes, it can. All dilemma related to converting your Shopify website into a mobile app is addressed using Flutter.

Flutter stays true to the word of writing it once and running it everywhere. The faster time-to-market is a definite plus factor in this case. And a single code base means less hassle to the QA and Development teams as well.

Earlier, we also thought that it was just another cross-platform technology with marginal improvements. But as we progressed our app development using Flutter, it indeed proved to be quite beneficient.

The notion of poor quality User Interface (UI) and limited access to native features began to fade away with Flutter in practice. It offers easy customization features for widgets, hence quickly catching up with native apps.

The next was regarding the cost overheads. Many of us thought that if Flutter is as good as it appears, then it definitely had to be expensive. Not really! Every good thing does not need to be expensive. Flutter is an open-source and completely free technology. All thanks to Google!

Furthermore, the additional cost of hiring separate resources for both the platforms have also vanished into thin air with Flutter. Flutter lets you build beautiful apps faster being productive and free at the same time.

Talking about app store submission and optimization, we have it all easy and simple with Flutter. Once you are familiar with App Store Optimization (ASO) techniques, your mobile apps won’t be left behind. At SayOne, we include ASO as a best practice right from the beginning.

There’s a lot more to talk about Flutter. You can also check out some of our recent blogs such as Why We Chose Flutter for Mobile App Development for a quick catch up. On the other hand, if you are looking for some high-end tech stuff using Flutter, we have it here: How to Create Custom Layouts in Flutter and How to Build iPhone Calculator using Flutter.

Conclusion: It’s Time to Flutter Your Shopify Store

You know the stats now. As you can see from the above graph, the number of mobile app downloads globally is increasing year after year. And Flutter is proving to be a top choice for many industry experts.

The e-commerce giant Alibaba has used Flutter to power up certain parts of their application. The Chinese magnet praises Flutter for its consistency across multiple platforms, intuitive UI designs and ease of learning.

So, the game is on with Flutter to build a remarkable mobile commerce experience.

Are you ready to Flutter? Then, let’s get started!

Originally published at https://www.sayonetech.com/blog/why-your-shopify-website-needs-mobile-app/.

Why Your Shopify Website needs a Mobile App? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.