The Essential Guide to Monetize Your Mobile Commerce App

Recent data shows that 80% of consumers use their mobile phones as a part of their shopping process. Yet, in spite of this data, all too few businesses offer customers the simple, straightforward mobile commerce experience they want. This leads to lost ad revenues and missed sales. If you’re ready to build your mobile commerce app, there are a few vital factors to keep in mind to encourage successful monetization.

Build An App For Your Startup – It’s Important

Without a doubt, mobile is the future of e-commerce, but it’s not necessarily enough to have only a mobile-friendly website anymore. This means it may be important for you to build a mobile app for your startup.

Why go through the trouble of building an app? Having a mobile commerce app offers you many advantages including:

Always being visible to your customers
Providing value to your customers
Enhancing customer engagement
Strengthening your brand and building brand recognition
Encouraging customer loyalty
Standing out from your competitors

When it comes to building an app, there are plenty of DIY tools you can use (e.g. GoodBarber, Shoutem, Swiftic, etc). If you want to hire someone, options include hiring a freelance or contract developer or hiring in-house developers. You can also look at developer shops and agencies. Your objective, regardless of the method you use, is to build the app well and build it right the first time.

Create The Best UI/UX Design For Your Mobile Commerce App

Keep in mind that all apps aren’t created equal. While you’ll want to make sure yours stands out with the best UI/UX design for a mobile app with ads or that sells your product, at the same time, you need to make sure you’ve covered these four design basics:

Make sure your design appeals to the users most likely to use your app. Research your users (e.g. surveys, interviews), and tailor your app’s functionality to suit their needs.
Your app needs to be useable. If consumers can’t use your app, then they won’t download it. If your app isn’t useful, the product is impractical and it’ll never get off the ground.
Aim for a simple and clean design. Cut down on the clutter and force yourself to consider whether you actually need all the content you want to put in the app. From watching a video ad to purchasing a product, users should be able to access what they want in a few simple steps.
Define the right placement for ads and products so they don’t annoy users or are overlooked by them. Also, in the case of ads, make sure they are shown at the right moment so they don’t interrupt the UX.

An example of an app with the best UI/UX design is Airbnb. The online marketplace and hospitality service company’s app enables users to instantly book a room anywhere across the globe, with its uncomplicated, smooth and straightforward design. Users simply put in where they want to stay, the dates and the number of guests, and their search is immediately returned with dozens of lodgings.

Choose The Right Monetization Services For Best Conversions

Before you get too lost in the creation of your app, you’ll need to know what you want to do with it. How do you want to monetize? While monetizing by selling your product is a no-brainer with a mobile commerce app, there are other ways that you can monetize depending on your business.

That being said, the most common app monetization method is through ads, particularly native advertising. The trick is to choose a few products that complement your app that won’t turn off your users. When it comes to incorporating ad content, relevancy and engagement are key.

For this reason, using a quality ad network and mobile discovery platform can be very useful in helping connect your app with the best content for your users. Appnext‘s mobile app platform is an example of this kind of useful tool that can deliver meaningful revenue.

If you don’t think ads are the right fit for your m-commerce app, you can explore other alternative ways to monetize including:

Have a paid app
Email marketing
SMS marketing
Offer in-app purchases
Find sponsors or partners
Become an affiliate
Offer a subscription

How To Optimize The Best Sales Funnel To Encourage Buying Customers

Your app’s sales funnel is another term for the consumer’s shopping journey. It addresses these four major points of the sales funnel to ensure the best conversion rate:

Awareness – Provide your app user with the solutions being offered and the way it can solve his/her existing problem.
Interest – Once the prospect is interested, offer a way for the user to learn more by providing more detailed information about individual products or services.
Decision Making – At this point, the potential customer is interested in buying. Here, various offers, deals, and packages can help to boost appeal and solidify the choice to purchase.
Action – The customer takes action to click the purchase button. The checkout process must be as seamless as possible. The easier it is to complete the transaction, the better are the odds that it will happen.

There are many examples of innovative mobile commerce apps that know how to drive sales. For instance, the m-commerce app, Spring, uniquely offers users an Instagram-like photo feed of products that they can purchase. This includes a curated community of brands ranging from luxury labels to emerging designers. Users can explore collections gathered by editors and influencers. Spring does not have a traditional shopping cart. Instead, after providing their credit card and shipping info, Spring users simply swipe beneath the item they want to buy it.

Give Users The Mobile Shopping Experience They Want

With the right planning, design, and strategy, your app can offer your startup a meaningful and lucrative monetization channel.

In my opinion, if you want to compete and succeed within the e-commerce sector, a mobile presence is essential. Today’s consumers gravitate toward a mobile shopping experience and the demand for this experience will only continue to grow, especially via mobile apps.

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