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Earlier this week, I wrote about the perils of leaping too quickly into building a mobile app. Sure, mobile is becoming a bigger and bigger deal, and yes, many companies have had success with apps. But, by and large, consumers don't want to try out new apps. They like being contacted via social media and, yes, email. And when it comes down to it, they mostly say they'd rather visit your mobile website.
So when does it make sense to build an app?
In February, I wrote about Wayfair's excellence in search, and noted my interest in the fact that they have mostly eschewed mobile apps (except for the flash deal site Joss & Main). Wayfair seemed skeptical about the costs, and so I decided to reach out to see how they approached their mobile strategy.
It turns out that Wayfair has been working on a mobile app, actually. Here's CEO Niraj Shah by email:
We are pretty long on mobile. For each of our three brands, we have picked a specific mobile approach. With Joss and Main, our private flash sale site, we’ve created a mobile app and seen great success with that in the past year. With Wayfair.com, while we have plans to develop a mobile app to launch this fall and a website for mobile web to launch this summer, the nature of the product categories we are in, coupled with the large selection we carry, has made it challenging to find the best way to proceed. With over 5 million items from 5,000 brands the undertaking of an app is significant. The success we have had with the Joss & Main app has led us to key learnings on the process of developing, executing and managing a mobile app for Wayfair.com.
Does this cut against my previous post arguing that mobile apps aren't the answer? I don't think so, and neither does Shah. In fact, mobile apps work best for bigger brands with a large number of committed users who will go to the trouble of downloading the app. If that sounds like you, a mobile app might be the answer. But if you're new, or your business is such that customers only interact with it occasionally, it might not be the best idea.
"Creating a mobile app just to have a mobile app shouldn’t be the approach companies take," Shah continued. "Creating an app to drive loyal customers toward for an even better experience in whatever category, whether shopping, networking or gaming, should be the end goal in creating a mobile app."
