E-commerce App vs Website. App Wins
Customers Prefer Mobile Apps Over Mobile Websites
It’s no surprise that 55% of page views come from mobile phones in 2021 [1]. And among mobile users, it’s also no surprise that users prefer mobile apps over mobile websites. When you’re on your phone and want to look at Gmail, Amazon, or YouTube, would you open your phone browser and type their URLs, or just tap on their apps?
Marketing news website, Marketing Dive, reports that 85% of mobile users prefer apps over mobile websites [2].
In this article, we look at a few reasons why this is so. Let’s go.
Mobile apps are more trustworthy
Apps less prone to phishing scams. A user could receive a scam email from an email address that looks genuine, click on the scam link that looks genuine, and be taken to a fake website that looks like an exact clone of the real website. Once the user enters their password to login, the fake website now knows how to login to the user’s account on the real website.
Apps tend to be more secure in this regard. Fake apps tend to not pass through Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store review processes. And fake URLs don’t launch the real apps of the companies they are pretending to be.
Thus, apps tend to be more trustworthy.
Mobile apps are safer
Did you know that when you put your website on the web, its source code can be easily viewed by anyone? This includes attackers that could inject their own code to modify the behavior of your website to trick your users. Your competitors could also write automated tools to skim your website to monitor your prices and promotions. This is much harder to accomplish with mobile apps because they are binary and their source code is not available.
Mobile apps are more convenient
When you’re on your phone and want to look at Gmail, Amazon, or YouTube, would you open your phone browser and type their URL, or just tap on their app?
Mobile apps provide better browsing experience
Unlike websites where the browser needs to request then load an entirely new page every time the user clicks on a link, apps make requests to an API for only the bits of data they need, and refreshes only the part that needs to show the new data. This provides a smoother and unbroken user experience (UX).
Mobile apps can be designed to work offline
In some areas, internet connections can be super slow, or even broken due to poor reception. Firing up a browser and entering a website URL is not going to load anything. A well-engineered app, on the other hand, could be designed to work offline. Downloaded data could be stored on the device previously, and used to provide some amount of functionality. An e-commerce app, for example, could still display products and past orders when offline.
Summary
Above are just a few advantages apps have over websites. Customers prefer to use apps over websites because they’re more convenient and provide a better browsing experience. Apps are also safer and don’t have the security challenges that websites face. That said, apps need to be well-designed and well-tested, as most users are not very forgiving of apps that fail to open after installation. In a future article, we will discuss why it’s important to make well-tested apps and how users perceive them when they crash.
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