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Small-Business Guide: Small Companies Seek to Push Sales and Marketing With Own Apps

Ms. Gurock deployed an app that allowed in-store customers to bypass the cash registers and check out their purchases themselves, on their mobile devices. Magic Beans got the app at no charge by working with its creator and agreeing to be a retail testing ground.

The app also allowed customers to scan a bar code to get product information, descriptions and reviews that had previously been available only to customers shopping online. When a customer bought an item using AisleBuyer, the app would automatically recommend two related products in the store and offer discounts and coupons. That resulted in an 8 percent increase in sales to those who used the app, Ms. Gurock said.

But the app has been used by just 5 percent of customers, Ms. Gurock said. Although she contends mobile self-checkout represents the future of retail, Magic Beans, which has five stores in the Boston area and 50 employees, was “very early to the party,” she said. “This app was on a mission to change 100 years of shopping habits, where the in-store experience is bringing your items to a cashier.”

As a result, she said Magic Beans was phasing out AisleBuyer, but she expected to try again — and with good reason. By the end of this year, according to the digital marketing firm eMarketer, there will be 116 million smartphone users in the United States.

At that point, reports Cisco, the number of mobile-connected devices globally will exceed the number of people. That is a large and expanding canvas for apps when consumers have come to expect one for almost everything, said Noah Elkin, an analyst with eMarketer. “It’s getting to the point where apps are similar to search,” he said. “If you don’t get any results for a brand, that brand doesn’t exist.”

That puts growing pressure on small businesses to create and publish their own apps. This guide looks at the experiences of several companies that have tried.

BUILDING IT: THE BASICS There are essentially two kinds of apps. Native apps are written for specific operating systems — Apple’s iOS, for example, or Google’s Android — and are installed directly on a device. They are available through online stores like iTunes or Google Play. Mobile Web apps run on a device’s Web browser — and because of that can be slower — but they work on a variety of systems. There is no app store for the mobile Web so those apps can be harder for consumers to find.

Small businesses can build native and mobile Web apps using do-it-yourself tools or by hiring a developer to custom-design one. Tiggzi, a development platform made by Exadel, offers drag-and-drop tools for building apps and integrates services like Facebook and OpenTable.

Titanium from Appcelerator does not require developers to have deep programming experience, but they do need to know JavaScript, HTML or CSS. EachScape, which also uses drag-and-drop tools, lets users build and manage apps that are delivered to a device as a native app.

Most platforms allow the builder to add features like push notifications (alerts that can announce sales, for example) and the ability to connect to social networks.

The cost depends on the scope and complexity of the app, Mr. Elkin said. For example, using Tiggzi, which is a cloud-based subscription service, the cost ranges from free for one app to $50 a month for 50. Custom designing an app can cost several thousand dollars.

MARKETING TOOL PrimeGenesis, an executive consulting firm in Stamford, Conn., created an iPad app last year to encourage users to buy the firm’s book, “The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan,” written by three of the company’s founders.

The firm has 13 partners and about $2 million in annual revenue, and it used Mobile Distortion, an app developer in San Diego. The app, which cost about $35,000, provides executives entering a new company with an interactive, mobile template for creating and carrying out a 100-day action plan.

PrimeGenesis sells the full app for $9.99 (a basic version is free), but George Bradt, managing director, says the firm measures the app’s success by the number of clients it produces. “The app is there to drive people to the book, which markets our firm,” he said.

Each new client it attracts represents about $50,000 in revenue. “If we sell 10,000 books a year and convert five buyers into consulting assignments,” Mr. Bradt said, “that’s a quarter of a million dollars.”

Small-Business Guide: Small Businesses Open Storefronts on Facebook

Ms. Miller put up a Web site, but about five months later her sister created a Got What It Cakes Facebook page. That’s when the business started to grow. Cake orders went from two or three a weekend to six to 10; now Ms. Miller is turning away another 10 each weekend. Annual revenue at the end of her second year in business was a little more than $40,000.

Got What It Cakes is part of a new wave of online commerce: F-commerce. Social media specialists say the term was coined in 2009 to describe the growing number of businesses that sell through a Facebook page. Payvment, a start-up that provides support for Facebook shopping transactions, says it has 170,000 clients and is signing on about 1,500 stores a week, most with fewer than five employees.

The rise of F-commerce has been largely haphazard, something Facebook did not instigate or promote. A spokesman declined to discuss the phenomenon, except to acknowledge, “Retailers are experimenting in a number of ways.”

Small businesses seem to be having more success on Facebook than large companies, said Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail analyst at Forrester. Those doing well, she said, generally have less than $100,000 in revenue and fewer than 10 employees. Gap, Nordstrom, J. C. Penney and GameStop, on the other hand, have all shut down Facebook stores in the last 12 months, mostly, Ms. Mulpuru said, because consumers are accustomed to the richer experience on retailing Web sites.

But Facebook can present challenges to businesses of all sizes. Some consumers do not feel safe buying directly from a Facebook storefront, said Krista Garcia, a social commerce analyst with a market research firm, eMarketer. And business owners should be aware that they do not own their Facebook pages — Facebook does, and it can change the appearance and rules whenever it wants.

GETTING STARTED It’s easy for a small business to open a Facebook storefront by creating a page in the business’s name, loading photos of the product and adding shopping functions. Because Facebook storefronts can look generic, small businesses have to find ways to differentiate themselves, said Jay Bean, chief executive of an online marketing firm, OrangeSoda.

Customizing a page is done by installing applications that enable customers to do things like shop, enter contests or see a menu. Apps are available from Facebook and outside vendors, or they can be custom-developed.

Payvment’s tools let businesses create a storefront with a shopping cart and promotions like discounts and coupons.

USE YOUR PERSONALITY Unlike larger businesses, small businesses can build on their personal relationships to end users, said Wendy Tan-White, chief executive of Moonfruit, which builds and supports e-commerce Web sites. She advises using a cover image for a business’s page that relates not only to the product or service but to customers, too.

On the Got What It Cakes storefront, for example, the cover photo shows the owner, Ms. Miller, in her home, with baby photos on the wall behind her and several cakes scattered about the sitting room; the smaller-profile photo is the company logo.

Many of Ms. Miller’s customers are busy mothers like her, and she communicates frequently with them on Facebook. “I am a local, one-person business but I have 5,000 fans,” she said.

Ms. Miller gives the kinds of tips her customers might get from a friend, like what to do with leftover chocolate cake batter: “Put some butter on your griddle and make pancakes with it.”

POST, PIN AND TAG To attract fans and friends, a storefront needs to be dynamic, with frequent posts — status updates and photos. Tagging people in a photo may cause the photo to show up on the tagged person’s page, where friends (and often friends’ friends) can see it.

Deann Kump, founder of TuTu Cute, which sells hair accessories and clothing for mothers, babies and toddlers, hosts a monthly photo contest on her page.

“If someone posts a photo of their daughter wearing one of my products and tags it, their friends will wonder, ‘What is TuTu Cute?’ and go to my page,” she said.

Mrs. Kump opened on Facebook last December and about half of her sales occur on the site.

Ms. Tan-White of Moonfruit suggested that a business give customers incentives to spread the word, offering a discount if they tag its product in a photo. Facebook’s “pin” feature allows users to pin a post, which might be a product of the week or a special discount and pushes the post to the top of a business’s page.

FOCUS ON COMMUNITY Magical Moments Modeling made TuTu Cute a “boutique of the month” on its Facebook page in April so friends of both pages could see it. And Mrs. Kump often promotes the work of children’s photographers she likes; they in turn promote her accessories.

Patrick Skoff, a painter who sells 90 percent of his paintings on Facebook, said some visitors to his page might have been hesitant about buying until they saw the comments and “likes” on new and sold paintings.

“They see all the likes and think, ‘Oh, I better buy that before someone else does,’ ” Mr. Skoff said.

In July he painted 10 paintings a day for 10 days and sold all of them through Facebook.

Darren Gann, co-owner of the Baby Grocery Store, started his Facebook storefront in February (he also has a kiosk in SouthPark Mall in Charlotte). Thirty-five percent of his sales come through Facebook, and Mr. Gann gives lots of help and advice to his customers. “They communicate with us there about everything, from asking about a shipment to what do we recommend for a gluten-free 9-month-old."

Heather Logrippo opened a Facebook storefront in 2009 for We’ve Labels, which sells clothing labels. She routinely goes to the Facebook pages where her customers spend time, like those for quilters or knitters.

“I log on as We’ve Labels and start interacting with people, writing things like: ‘That’s a beautiful scarf you’ve knitted,’ ” she said. Those knitters and quilters will often click on the We’ve Labels page out of curiosity.

OFFER OPTIONS While some small businesses sell only through Facebook, others maintain separate Web sites or have bricks-and-mortar outlets, because not all consumers feel comfortable using their credit card information on the site.

Ashley Gall, owner of Méli Jewelry, which sells jewelry she designs and makes, said buying on Facebook was still too new for many of her customers — 15 percent of her sales happen there — so she also sells on Etsy, Indie Fashion Marketplace and her own Web site.

Most of Mandie Miller’s customers order on Facebook and pay when she delivers the cake or when they pick it up. Yet she still maintains a Web site of her own.

“I do a lot of wedding cakes, and it’s the moms and dads of brides usually paying and they often want to go to a regular business Web site. I also have grandmothers in their 80s and 90s that come to my cake tastings,” she said. “They aren’t on Facebook.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 25, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to recent changes that Facebook made to its site to allow more than one-time payments by letting customers store credit card information on the site. Those changes apply to virtual goods, not real products.