I was talking with a reader today about some of the best mobile ecommerce apps on the planet. I’m shocked to say that — from the top of my head — I came up with three:
– Ocado (supermarket, groceries)
– Touchnote (postcards from your phone)
– Pizza Hut (order pizza via your phone)
There’s gotta be more! This is not good! I just… I’m having a brain freeze. What ecommerce apps do you use on a regular basis? I need to put a list together I think!
I’m talking about applications where you can actually order something physical as a result.
What am I missing?
Amazon
yeah amazon RULES especially with one click turned on
A third vote for Amazon, though I guess you could consider Ebay to be “Ecommerce” 🙂
The main reason there is so few, is because of what a pain in-app purchase is to implement well on a phone. The minute you decide the UX of entering a credit card or being pre registered is too much hassle you enter a mine field
Apples in app purchase whilst brilliant for digital goods cannot be used for physical goods
PSMS is ugly and you would need great margins to sustain on most physical goods
Most solutions require you integrate with or embed and remove the chrome of the browser in your app
Its something thats crying out to be made easy, yet is still unfortunately hard, thankfully some players are starting to emerge!
You can actually use PayPal on the Apple platform to pay for physical goods — that works quite well!
I completely forgot Amazon and eBay
It's simply genius, totally agree
Oh aye!
The Best Buy apps allows purchase. So do a few of the US airlines….for example, the regional carrier Southwest allows you to book a flight from an app, and one more, Fandango will allow you to buy a movie ticket. The Pizza Hut one is the best though, as it truly uses the functionality of an iPhone to make the process entertaining.
best e-commerce “on the planet”? That'll be M-PESA in Kenya then. 8 million customers moving $350million per month can't be wrong.
Very good point, John!
“More users will likely connect to the internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years,” proclaimed the Mobile Internet Report in December. This is a good stat for the future of e-commerce. Good point Ewan on PayPal integration. Here is our range: http://www.appcreatives.co.uk/appcreatives-port…
Pretty nice topic. I am interested in mobile E-commerce Apps. Do you have any more information to share with us? Thank you.