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Now that we carry these mobile devices around in pockets and handbags, be they tablet or smart phone, the high street retailers are out to take advantage of this, rather than engage in a battle that they couldn’t win. The trick behind any good e-commerce or m-commerce site is to remove the barriers to the customer purchasing journey. In other words, make it as easy as possible for the customer to complete their purchase, in the least amount of time. To achieve this, the high street retailers have been looking at ways to streamline their own buying process. One key avenue of development, is having barcode scanner apps downloaded onto smart phones and tablets.

These apps, known as native apps because they are specific to each shopping chain, are set to be a ‘major player’ in the continued success of M-Commerce during this year and are said to be one of the mobile trends to watch in 2015.

Scandit, leaders in the barcode scanning app industry, have revealed that a massive total of 4.5 million of their barcodes were scanned during the last Black Friday in America, which is a surprisingly impressive figure that suggests that these predictions for native apps may prove to be correct. Slowly but surely retailers have caught on that native apps are an excellent way to acquire  ”an edge” over their rivals, meaning that scanning barcodes in stores may end up becoming mainstream in 2015.

Mobile applications with in-app barcode scanning empower consumers in entirely new ways, enabling them to avoid long checkout lines through smartphone-based self-checkout, capture and save product information, compare prices in real-time, submit or view user reviews, build and share lists, find items while in-store, and more. The increase in mobile barcode scanning during the shopping experience points to a broader trend: consumers, especially consumers born after 1980, are using smartphones and tablets more than ever to make purchasing decisions, both online and offline.

Shoppers do generally use their mobile devices to research products before making a purchase these days, meaning that an easy-to-use app builds customer relationships, with consumers returning to an app (or even the store) if the app provides an excellent user-experience. The appearance of an app or website obviously impacts on how consumers conceive a brand, as well as how safe it is to make purchases. Therefore a beautifully-designed native app can not only be a consumer’s first choice for browsing, but also result in a purchase via a mobile or a tablet.

The ability to scan barcodes with mobile devices to instantly compare prices are now used by many retailers, which can be used as a quick way to see how much competitors are selling products for. Businesses don’t want to be creating the ultimate mobile shopping experience, only to lose out on a sale due to the product being cheaper elsewhere. However, it is native apps that will ultimately keep customers engaged and drive sales, especially if there is a reward scheme in place. The ability to scan products to get additional information is also a fun and useful tool that will also bring customers in-stores, largely due to consumers wanting to show off the cool new tool to their friends.

Ultimately, there are many benefits (and cons) to a retailers having either a native app or a mobile site for their brand, but only time will tell if native apps will turn out to be one of the most successful mobile trends of 2015. But one thing is for sure, barcode-scanning apps are currently doing wonders for the numbers of people making purchases via their mobiles.