Rapid Application Development with Hybrid Technology

Mobile commerce is growing rapidly and like many retailers, a client of ours saw an opportunity to expand their e-commerce experience to mobile in order to maximize e-commerce revenue and better align with the needs of the modern consumer. In May of 2013, PointSource was tasked with revolutionizing the client’s mobile e-commerce strategy. In collaboration with their business team, PointSource designed, developed, and launched the mobile website in October of 2013 and we continue to add features and functionality on a near monthly basis. Most recently, we developed the client’s mobile app, which was distributed to the Apple AppStore and Google Play in November of 2014.

In this post, I’ll provide best practices and a case study illustrating how we translated the mobile website experience into an installable application that have collectively driven higher customer engagement, increased revenue, and a positive return on the investment.

Architectural Secret Sauce

We were able to reuse more than 90% of the code from the mobile website in the app. The code reuse did not happen by accident and was only possible because the correct architecture was selected for the mobile website. We planned for an app as part of the design and development of the mobile website, using a single page app (SPA) architecture that works incredibly well for mobile applications since full-page refreshes never occur and the website renders portions of the page based on a user’s actions. Our blog post Responsive Web Design for Mobile Commerce provides additional information on mobile website architecture.

The app leverages hybrid application technology, which enables rapid app creation using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. As a result of these technology choices, we were able to reuse the vast majority of the code from the mobile website. This approach also enabled us to fully mirror the mobile website’s user experience for standard features like searching, browsing, viewing product details, checkout, and account management with no additional work. Additionally, the time saved through code reuse enabled us to focus on what was important: application-specific features that add value to the customer.

Mobile Application Engagement

When a user chooses to install your app onto his or her device, he or she has given you a much greater ability to communicate and engage. While the ability to rapidly develop an application is nice, the flip side of the coin is that a development team must be careful not to simply shoehorn a mobile site into an app solely for the sake of having an app. An application should be purpose-built to provide value above-and-beyond what’s given on the web; otherwise, users will simply delete the app to conserve space on their devices. In order for the user to continue to implicitly agree to increased engagement, your app must have value-add features that make keeping it worthwhile.

Since we were able to incorporate all of the core functionality of the mobile site (search, checkout, daily deals, PLPs, PDPs, etc.) into the app in only a few weeks of two developers’ time, we had much more time to focus on the true value-adds:

• Push notifications with geolocation and user-segmenting using IBM Mobile Customer Engagement (Android and iOS)
• Barcode scanning for in-store price comparisons
• Geolocation for address information to add ease of use to checkout and increase conversion rate
• Application-optimized landing screen to drive user attention based on the application use cases given by the client
• Intelligent mobile web-to-app deep linking which leverages shared codebase to provide routing through Smart App Banner on mobile web so users can pick up where they left off in the app, a step in the right direction toward an omni-channel experience
• Improved category selection
• Integration with the native Facebook app to compliment the existing web-based Facebook integration
• Integration with Cordova PayPal plugin which, among other things, allows users to input card information via camera instead of keyboard

Immediate Impact

As developers, feature development is typically the most exciting part of work for us and creating something new and groundbreaking is what gets us out of bed in the morning. The opportunity to see the business results of these cutting-edge implementations are equally exciting, and with that in mind we’d like to share some of the impact that the app has had in its short time on the market.

In 2014, mobile phone traffic account for roughly 30% of their page views on Black Friday. The 5-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday also saw a 308% increase in mobile revenue from 2013 with a 124% increase in the mobile conversion rate. Despite being released to the app stores a mere two weeks prior to this time period, revenue obtained from the mobile app alone during this 5-day period was greater than the cost of app development, making a compelling case for app investment in addition to mobile web.

Conclusions

The immediate impact of the app on business results was very refreshing to see, and the code reuse obtained with mobile web puts us in a nice position to continually iterate to improve the app and the mobile website on the same shared codebase. By combining these principles with Responsive Web Design (see our blog post From Responsive Design to Responsive Delivery), one can easily see how these concepts could be expanded to both tablet web and app and even desktop web.