Shopgate, which allows online retailers to create, maintain and optimise native apps, introduced Facebook Tools.

This will give merchants the ability to understand consumers and drive retention, engagement and conversion. They will have access to analytics, push and in-app notifications as well as targeted mobile advertising with deep-linking.

“Over half of all Facebook users only access Facebook through mobile devices, making it a key marketing outlet for our merchants,” says Casey Gannon, Shopgate’s VP marketing.

“With this new suite of Facebook capabilities, retailers can focus on acquisition through targeted app campaigns and increasing purchase frequency with their current users,” she added.

Retailers will be able to use an analytics dashboard to get broader audience insights like age, gender, location, interests, and education.

They can also send push and in-app notifications to segments of people based on the actions they’ve taken within the app.

Facebook Login is now available on all apps powered by Shopgate. This allows customers to bypass the manual entry of personal information by connecting to their Facebook account.

Retail experts agree that this reduces cart abandonment, as it removes a step of the checkout process consumers are wary of – registration. In addition to a reduced abandonment rate, merchants get the added benefit of pre-validated account info at sign-up.

Shopgate merchants will also be able to add a Pixel Code from their Facebook Business account to their mobile website to get better user insights on their mobile website traffic and create target audiences for Facebook ad campaigns that most resemble current customers.

Shopgate is headquartered in Austin, TX, and has a team of 200 in the US and Europe.