In a recent Internet Retailing webinar, Learn how apps can drive your retail business, with case studies from Missguided, House of Fraser and more, we heard from Michael Langguth, co-founder of Poq in a session on how apps can drive retail businesses. Here’s a bulletpoint overview.
• The webinar opened with a poll: Does your organisation have a retail app or do you plan to in 2017.
Yes: 26%, No: 19%, No, but we are planning to launch one: 6%, Not a retailer: 48%.
• Why have an app now? The average online shopper is spending 6% more money on apps, and 5% less on the mobile web.
• Apps driving higher conversion rates (x2) and higher revenue per user (x5) than the mobile web.
• About Poq: works with large UK and European retailers.
• When do I have a business case? 1. Mobile site performing worse than desktop site. 2. When mobile traffic is growing. 3. When you offer a loyalty scheme: “none of us ever leaves their home without their phone, so you will never forget that loyalty card. From a retailer perspective, shoppers will always be logged onto the app and can use their loyalty card in store, connecting channels to give one view of the customer.” 4. Your target demographic is millenials or early adopters.
Case studies
Missguided
Tinder style app demo: enables customers to say what they like or don’t like, machine learning engine can learn from that to offer more relevant suggestions.
3-second checkout. 0-£30m revenue in four months.
House of Fraser
Loyalty: one account connecting every channel. Shoppers can personalise the experience by choosing sizes, stores, cards.
Augmented reality: scan pages of catalogues to get more information. Order values rise by 20%, browsing increases (x1.8)
Conversion rate +100% vs mobile website
• How to get an app?
“In many ways you should think about it in the same way as your website. It needs to be scalable, extensible and customisable and you need to have something that really feels and looks like the brand.”
In the 1990s, people would handcraft their website but now use ecommerce platforms and build the website on top. Poq app platform enables you to build on top: cloud ecosystem, SaaS platform.
The webinar was followed by a Q&A session with questions covering areas from best approaches to app design, and choosing payment options. To see the webinar and the Q&A session in full, visit the Poq webinar page here.
