Zovi mobile website is awesome while Android app needs work

After winning the #BlogForZovi contest held by Zovi, I got this opportunity to guest blog for the brand. This post is the second guest post I am writing for them. You can read the first one here. In case you are unaware of what I'm talking about, read the winning post.

In this post, I will describe my experience of shopping via the Android application and the mobile website property owned by the brand. After all, mobile is the future; e-commerce is going mobile.

You can download the app on your device from here. But, from my experience, that would be a bad idea. You read it right! Read on to know why I'm saying so.

Before I say anything else, I would like to re-iterate that e-commerce is going mobile (or it already has?). Any business which does not take care of this aspect now will lose a significant amount of sales to its competitors who do. Keeping that in mind, I would suggest Zovi to seriously work on their Android app (I haven't used the one for Windows). It is just not behaving the way it should. Their mobile website is awesome though. Kudos to the team.

This time, I thought of buying stuff for my family. I asked my sister to select for herself. Once she did, I knew the names of the products to be ordered. As the next logical step, I went ahead and tried searching them on the app. To my surprise, the behavior of the software was strange. The search results said that one such product existed, but did not list it (see screenshot below).

To verify the presence of that item, I decided to visit their mobile website. To my surprise, the product was easily searchable there (see screenshot below).

I knew it could be a mistake from my end, so I decided to give the benefit of doubt to the app developer (after all, I have also been one, at times). I tried searching the same thing one more time, but with no luck. Just to be definitely sure, I searched a third time for a totally different product. But all in vain! The app wasn't willing to budge. The mobile website, on the other hand, was still obedient. That is when I came to a conclusion that the development team at Zovi hadn't put their best in this product. I wish they take care of it ASAP.

But wait, that's not the only unexpected thing I found. When exploring through the phone memory, I discovered that the app created a lot of temporary files in the phone memory. I had to manually get rid of them to free up my precious memory (no screenshot this time though). I hope the team at Zovi takes this issue seriously before it creates a huge impact in terms of their decreasing sales. No business would want to lose their loyal customers.

There are a few plus points too. The overall look and feel of the app is appealing. The checkout screen is simple, and the process to complete an order is hassle-free.

Following are the items I bought:

One thing I really liked about the app is that the screen that leads to the checkout page displays discount coupons, and also suggests other useful categories and products (screenshot below).

The overall look and feel of the app is appealing. The selection of light colors makes it soothing for the eyes.

I received the following:

Did you anytime try their Android or Windows app? Or their mobile website? How was your experience? I would love to hear from you. Use the comment box below. :)

This blogpost is part of #BlogForZovi held by zovi.com.