A few years ago, “launching a mobile app for your store” meant a six-figure custom build, a six-month timeline, and an engineering team to maintain it.
That’s why most ecommerce brands today don’t have one, even though shoppers are using apps more than ever, and the need for brands to have owned channels they can control is stronger than ever.
Today, most stores can launch their own mobile app, even without a huge budget or a development team in place. You don’t need to hire developers, or shell out hundreds of thousands to an agency.
can launch a real native app in weeks, on top of the store they already run, without hiring developers or committing to a parallel codebase. The build is the part that’s gotten easier. What hasn’t changed is what it takes to go from “the app is built” to “the app is contributing real revenue.”
Here’s what it looks like to launch your own app, end-to-end, from planning your build through to getting users on your app.
Quick Summary
Launching a mobile app for your ecommerce store is easier and more important than it’s ever been.
The first step is getting your app. Just about any store can afford to build a mobile app today, using a no-code app builder, or a custom app service like MobiLoud. The goal is to build a new surface, optimized for your best customers, while still delivering a consistent and optimized user experience across all your channels.
Once you’ve got an app, submit it to the app stores and get it in front of your best customers by promoting it on your website, in your emails, and via SMS and social media. You want to get a small, but engaged group of customers to download your app, which is easily done without a huge promotional push.
Why Your Ecommerce Brand Needs a Mobile App
Every business today needs reliable channels where they own the relationship with their customer.
Paid ads only work as long as you keep paying. Others let algorithms or deliverability filters decide whether a customer sees you, or whether you’re invisible.
A mobile app lives on your customer’s home screen, and gives you a direct line to the customer, always on, always present.
It’s the kind of presence that builds a sustainable business. Regular customers remain active for longer, come back more often, and shop for longer when they do – and the result is higher AOV, higher conversion rates, and 3.5-7x higher LTV from app users.
And every dollar you make through the app contributes more profit, since customers open the app and shop without you needing to spend anything on ads.
It’s a powerful channel, for building and strengthening customer relationships, as well as driving revenue. And it’s not as difficult to launch one as it once was.
The Strategic Picture: What Your App Should Be
Before you build anything, get clear on the purpose your app serves.
It’s a new surface for your store – but it’s still your store.
The goal is to give regular customers a more convenient, lower-friction way to shop with you. In most cases, the fundamentals are the same; products, prices, customer accounts, design scheme.
Where a lot of brands get into trouble is they see the need to rebuild the experience in their mobile app from the ground up. What they end up with is, essentially a separate storefront.
It becomes far more work than it needs to be to build the app, and to keep it up to date. The user experience often suffers, as well. You’ve spent years optimizing your website, testing and improving every part of it. Building something completely unique may mean a step back – not to mention a confusing experience for customers who shop with you on different channels.
The best way to think of it is one storefront, delivered to multiple channels.
Now let’s get into how to build your app.
How to Build Your Ecommerce Mobile App
A mobile app for an ecommerce store is two things: a native front-end that runs on iOS and Android, and a connection to your existing store on the backend.
The front-end is what the customer sees on their phone. The backend is your store as it already is: catalog, pricing, accounts, checkout, all of it. The app talks to the backend, and the customer gets a native experience on top of the data and logic you already run.
You can hire a team of developers to do all this. But that means a huge cost, and a lengthy launch timeline.
The better approach to ecommerce mobile app development is to use a tool or service built specifically for helping brands launch mobile apps.
These come in two different shapes:
- Managed services like MobiLoud: custom app services that work with ecommerce brands to launch native apps.
- No-code app builders: SaaS tools that let you compile and publish an app yourself, through their dashboard.
The service approach tends to be a higher cost, but more comprehensive, and better for high-end stores where reliability and consistency with their website is essential.
The DIY no-code approach is better for smaller stores, or brands that want a more hands-on approach with building and managing their app.
Both are reasonable options – and both can get you 95% of what you used to have to pay developers to build, for a fraction of the cost and time investment.
From Build to Live: The App Store Submission Process
Once your app is built, the next step is getting it onto Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
The submission process has a few moving parts:
- Developer accounts. You’ll need an Apple Developer Program membership ($99/year) and a Google Play Developer account ($25 one-time fee). Both are registered to your business.
- App store assets. Each store requires an app icon, screenshots from a real device (multiple sizes for different phone models), a short description, a long description, and a privacy policy URL. Apple also requires a sample login if your app has gated functionality, and a contact for the reviewer.
- The app store review. Apple reviews every submission, to make sure the app is worthy of their store. Google’s process is mostly automated but does include checks. Apple’s reviews usually take a few days, sometimes longer at peak periods like the lead-up to the holidays. Google’s are typically faster.
- Rejections. First-time submissions get rejected fairly often, almost always for fixable reasons: missing metadata, an unclear privacy policy, screenshots that don’t match the live app, or a feature that violates a specific App Store guideline. A rejection isn’t a setback as long as you can address the reviewer’s note and resubmit, which usually clears within a few days.
End to end, the submission process takes one to three weeks for most apps. Faster if everything is in order on the first submission; longer if you run into a rejection that requires meaningful changes.
If you’re using a managed service, this is the part you mostly don’t have to think about. The service handles assets, submission, communication with the reviewers, and fixing any rejections.
How to Get Customers to Install Your App
Once you’ve got an app, once it’s in the app store, that’s the job done, right?
Not quite.
An app with no users is not much good. And if you don’t promote it at all, it could end up invisible, gathering dust, driving $0 in sales.
The good news is it doesn’t take a huge, expensive launch to get enough users in your app to make it worthwhile. The primary focus is just making sure your regular customers know about the app.
You don’t even need to sell it that hard. Your best customers, those you’re launching the app for, will want to download it. You just need to make sure they know about it.
A standard launch playbook looks like this:
- Email and SMS announcement to your existing list, explaining what the app does for them specifically: faster checkout, exclusive offers, order tracking, push notifications for back-in-stock and abandoned cart, whatever applies to your store. Make a light argument for why it’s worth it to download the app.
- Site banner on mobile web prompting visitors to download the app. This is usually the single biggest source of installs in the first month. Anyone visiting your site on a phone is a high-intent install candidate.
- Checkout and account-page prompts for customers who are clearly engaged: “Install the app for one-tap checkout next time.”
- Post-purchase flow including an app prompt in the order confirmation page or email. A customer who just bought is in the highest-trust window you’ll get.
- An install incentive, like 10% off the first app order or early access to a drop, applied to any of the above to nudge fence-sitters.
Long-term, make sure you keep surfacing it in customer communications. Make sure any regular buyer knows it exists. That covers 90% of your new customer acquisition.
Keeping Your Installs
The other challenge is making sure customers keep using your app.
If your app delivers a good user experience, is bug-free, and up to date with your store, your best customers will keep using it – especially if your brand is a natural for repeat purchases.
However, you’ll want to keep active to make sure all your customers keep seeing the value in it.
- Run app-exclusive promos, product launches and other campaigns, to make users feel part of a select group of VIPs.
- Use push notifications regularly (without spamming). This keeps users engaged and stops them from forgetting about your app.
- Maintain the app, make sure new features on your site are available in the app (your app should always offer a better user experience than your website).
The goal isn’t just downloads – but sustained downloads, which still persist six months or more down the line.
Final Thoughts
Launching a mobile app for an ecommerce brand isn’t the project it was a decade ago. The question is how to get there, and when you’re going to pull the trigger and say go.
There are two good ways to get your own app: building it with a no-code ecommerce app builder, or a managed service like MobiLoud that does it all for you.
Either way can get you to a fast, high-converting mobile app in just a few weeks.
From there, it’s just about getting it in the app store, and getting it in front of your customers.
The distance between “no app today” and “a meaningful share of online revenue from an app” is shorter than most operators think. Most of the work is already done: you have the store, the customers, and the channels to reach them. The launch is the last piece.
