Category: Enterprise Ecommerce

Enterprise mobile app development is the process of building, launching, and maintaining native iOS and Android apps for large-scale businesses.

For ecommerce brands doing $50M+ in annual revenue, that process of launching a mobile app looks very different than it does for a small Shopify store. The stakes are higher, the tech stacks are more complex, and the wrong approach can burn six figures before you have anything to show for it.

The business case of mobile apps isn’t up for debate anymore. As of 2026, app users convert at 3-4x the rate of mobile web visitors, deliver 2.8-5x higher lifetime value, and generate a disproportionate share of revenue relative to their size as a customer segment. 

For enterprise brands, even a modest lift in mobile conversion and retention translates to millions in incremental revenue. That’s a board-level growth lever, not just another middling asset.

But enterprise ecommerce isn’t Shopify with a premium theme. You’re running dozens of integrations, custom checkout flows, multi-region storefronts, and a tech stack that took years to build. 

The mobile app solutions designed for small and mid-market merchants simply weren’t built for this level of complexity.

This guide breaks down what enterprise brands actually need from mobile app development in 2026, where the common approaches fall short, and how to evaluate your options without burning a year and a six-figure budget finding out.

Why Do So Few Enterprise Brands Have Mobile Apps?

Only 1 out of every 5 US brands with $5M+ in monthly revenue currently have a mobile app. If we reduce the threshold to $1M-$5M per month in revenue, that drops to less than 1 in 10.

At a time where mobile-first commerce is the default and omnichannel presence is table stakes, that’s a striking gap.

It exists for a reason. Building a mobile app that actually works for an enterprise ecommerce operation is hard. Not because the technology doesn’t exist, but because most solutions on the market were designed for a different kind of business.

A DTC brand on Shopify with 15 apps and a standard checkout can spin up a mobile app in a few weeks using a platform-specific builder. 

An enterprise brand running Salesforce Commerce Cloud with Algolia search, Dynamic Yield personalization, Klaviyo email flows, a custom loyalty program, and localized storefronts across six countries? 

That’s a different problem entirely.

The gap comes down to three things:

Stack complexity

A typical enterprise ecommerce operation runs 80-100+ integrations that directly touch the customer experience. 

Reviews, search, personalization, subscriptions, loyalty, live chat, payment gateways, fraud detection, tax calculation, shipping logic. 

Each one represents functionality that has to be replicated or preserved in any mobile app.

Organizational risk tolerance

Enterprise teams have seen 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet their objectives (McKinsey’s number, not ours). 

A poorly executed mobile app launch doesn’t just waste budget. It creates customer service headaches, breaks trust with your best customers, and makes internal stakeholders gun-shy about the next mobile initiative.

The maintenance burden

Launching is only half the problem. Enterprise brands update their websites constantly: new product lines, seasonal campaigns, promotions, landing pages, A/B tests. 

Any mobile app strategy that requires maintaining a separate content pipeline is a non-starter for teams already stretched thin.

How Do Enterprise Brands Build Mobile Apps Today?

There are three paths you might have been looking at to build your mobile app. For the majority of enterprise ecommerce brands, none are perfect.

Let’s break them down in more detail.

Path 1: Custom Native Development

The traditional enterprise answer: hire an agency or build an internal team, spend $250K-$500K+, and build a fully custom iOS and Android app from scratch. 

Whether the team uses native Swift/Kotlin, cross-platform frameworks like React Native or Flutter, or a combination, the project scope is roughly the same.

For the world’s largest retailers (think Amazon, Walmart, Target), this makes sense. They have dedicated mobile engineering teams, the budget to sustain it, and enough app users to warrant a fully independent codebase.

For most enterprise brands in the $50M-$500M range, it’s a different calculus. Custom development means:

• 6-12+ months to launch. Your competitors with apps are capturing mobile revenue while you’re still in sprint planning.
• Rebuilding your entire integration stack. Every integration on your website needs a corresponding mobile implementation. At $30,000-$50,000 per integration (build plus first-year maintenance), a stack of 30 integrations could cost over a million dollars in API work alone.
• Permanent parallel maintenance. Every website update, every new product feature, every promotional campaign now has to be built twice. You need a dedicated mobile team, or your app falls behind your website within months.
• Ongoing engineering costs of $150K-$300K+ per year just to keep the app updated, handle OS changes, and maintain integrations.

Custom development is the right choice when your mobile app needs to do something fundamentally different from your website.

For ecommerce brands, that’s rarely necessary. You’re not building a mobile-native multimedia app. You’re not building the next Netflix or TikTok. You’re just taking what already exists – your web store – and turning it into a native app.

Building a fully custom, fully native app from the ground up means paying for a solution to a problem that doesn’t need to be this expensive.

Path 2: Platform-Specific App Builders

Hundreds of no-code, drag and drop app builders have made mobile apps accessible for a wide range of ecommerce brands. 

These tools are fast, affordable, and purpose-built for the Shopify ecosystem.

They’re excellent for what they were designed for. But enterprise ecommerce, with its complex stacks and cross-platform requirements, sits outside their sweet spot.

You’re likely to run into walls like:

Platform lock-in

Most app builders only work with Shopify. If you’re on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce (Magento), BigCommerce Enterprise, commercetools, or a custom headless stack, these tools simply don’t support your platform.

API limitations

App builders that connect to Shopify’s Storefront API are working with a subset of your store’s actual functionality. The API returns product data, not your rendered storefront. That means custom Liquid code, JavaScript-dependent features, and third-party app widgets may not translate to your app.

Integration gaps

Some of your most valuable integrations may require enterprise-tier pricing from the app builder, or may not be supported at all. When a tool like Algolia search or ReCharge subscriptions doesn’t work in your app, your customers get a degraded experience compared to your website.

Feature ceilings

Drag-and-drop builders give you a templated app layout, not your actual store experience. For enterprise brands that have invested heavily in their website UX, being forced into a template is a significant step backward.

Path 3: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

PWAs promise app-like experiences without building a native app. 

For enterprise brands already running sophisticated web stacks, the appeal is obvious: no App Store submission, no separate codebase, works across all platforms. And most enterprise-level, headless or composable commerce platforms support PWA functionality out of the box.

But a PWA is not a mobile app.

PWAs can’t be published to the App Stores, they’re limited on push notification functionality, customers rarely go through the process to add them to the home screen, and their support on iOS is limited.

A PWA is an excellent mobile web enhancement. But a replacement for a native app? It is not.

Can You Turn an Enterprise Ecommerce Website Into a Native App?

There’s a fourth approach that most enterprise evaluation frameworks miss because it doesn’t fit neatly into the “build vs buy” dichotomy: taking your existing website and extending it into a native mobile app. 

Instead of rebuilding your ecommerce experience from scratch (custom dev) or recreating it through an API (app builders), your actual website powers a native iOS and Android app, with native functionality layered on top. 

Everything you’ve built on the web carries over. Your customers get a native app experience, built on (and fully synced with) your existing web experience.

This solves a number of key hurdles for enterprise ecommerce brands:

Every integration carries over automatically

Algolia search, Dynamic Yield personalization, ReCharge subscriptions, LoyaltyLion rewards, Gorgias live chat. Even niche tools or custom features.

If it works on your website, it works in the app. No rebuilding, no re-integrating, no gaps in the customer experience. 

For a brand running 80+ integrations, this eliminates millions in potential re-implementation costs, as well as potential feature gaps.

Your content stays in sync

When you update a product page, launch a promotion, redesign a landing page, it’s live in the app the moment it’s live on your site.

With traditional app development approaches, your marketing team could spend hours and hours on parallel updates, trying to keep the website and app experiences consistent.

The real cost isn’t just the time you spend – it’s the drag on your focus, and the inevitability that the two platforms will fall out of sync if you try to manage this manually.

The “website to app” approach solves this problem in one shot.

Platform doesn’t matter

Whether you’re on Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, a headless stack, or something entirely custom, you can launch your app without spending hundreds of thousands on a custom build.

The approach works because it builds on your website, not your platform’s API.

Native capabilities where they count

Push notifications (for promotions, order updates, automated abandoned cart and behavioral campaigns, more), deep linking, native navigation, an icon on your customer’s home screen, and App Store presence. 

Your app will have all the features a real mobile app needs. It’s not a “lite” version of a mobile app, it’s not a PWA, it’s not a shortcut. It’s a real mobile app.

Launch in weeks, not months

Because you’re not rebuilding your store, the development cycle compresses dramatically. You could go live in just 30 days – contrast that to a custom build which runs months, potentially years.

This is the approach Vendrux takes. It’s how brands like Bestseller (parent of Jack & Jones, Vero Moda, ONLY), John Varvatos, Tadashi Shoji, and many more run high-ROI, low-maintenance mobile apps.

How These Approaches Compare

Let’s break down the core differences between the four enterprise mobile app development paths discussed above:

What Should Enterprise Brands Look for in a Mobile App?

Enterprise mobile app requirements look different from mid-market brands or SMBs. After watching brands at this scale evaluate and struggle with mobile strategies, a clear set of non-negotiables emerges:

1. Full Tech Stack Preservation

This is the big one. Your website runs on a stack you’ve spent years building and optimizing. Reviews, search, personalization, subscriptions, loyalty, analytics, A/B testing, payment gateways, custom checkout flows. You want this to carry over to your app.

Any mobile app strategy that requires rebuilding or replacing those integrations is asking you to take on enormous cost and risk for a problem you’ve already solved. The right approach preserves your entire stack.

2. Zero Duplicate Content Management

Enterprise ecommerce teams are already managing content across multiple channels. Adding a parallel content pipeline for a mobile app (separate product uploads, separate promotional content, separate navigation updates) creates operational overhead that compounds over time.

The app should reflect your website in real time. Update your site, and the app updates automatically.

3. Platform Compatibility

Enterprise ecommerce runs on a wide range of platforms: Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce Enterprise, commercetools, custom headless builds. 

Your mobile app solution needs to work with your existing ecommerce platform; you’re not going to replatform your website just to make it work with your app.

4. Enterprise-Grade Support and SLAs

When your app is generating millions in revenue, you need more than a support ticket queue. Dedicated success managers, guaranteed response times, direct access to engineering, and proactive monitoring are baseline requirements.

5. Multi-Region and Multi-Language Support

Enterprise brands operating across markets need apps that handle localized storefronts, multiple currencies, and regional compliance requirements without building separate apps for each market.

6. Security and Compliance

SOC 2 compliance, GDPR readiness, data encryption in transit and at rest, SSO support, and data handling policies that satisfy your legal and procurement teams. 

Enterprise evaluation processes require documentation on all of these, and many app solutions built for SMBs simply don’t have them.

7. Scalability

Your app needs to handle traffic spikes during flash sales, product drops, and peak shopping seasons (Black Friday, holiday) without degradation. An approach that ties into your existing web infrastructure inherits whatever scalability your website already has, rather than introducing a new bottleneck.

8. Speed to Market With Low Risk

Perhaps counterintuitively, enterprise brands often need to move faster, not slower, than smaller competitors. 

A 12-month custom development cycle means 12 months of lost mobile revenue. The ideal solution launches in weeks, not months, without cutting corners on quality or functionality.

What ROI Do Enterprise Mobile Apps Actually Deliver?

Vendrux’s 2025 Ecommerce Mobile App Benchmark Report analyzed performance data across multiple ecommerce brands. 

Here’s the difference that mobile apps make.

Revenue contribution

Brands with mobile apps see anywhere from 10-35% of their revenue, on average, through their apps.

This typically comes from a much smaller share of users – and the gap can be extreme in outlying cases.

A wellness and pharmacy brand we worked with had 16% of its customers using the app. But those users generated 62% of their total online revenue. Revenue contribution was nearly 4x higher than the app’s share of traffic.

It’s not the only example. Junior Couture, a luxury children’ s fashion brand, drove 50% of their BFCM revenue in 2025 through their app – from just 5% of their total customers.

Higher conversion rates

Each app session is much more likely to lead to a sale.

One converted at 9.1% inside the app versus 1.1% on mobile web. That’s an 8x lift. 

Another, a luxury fashion label saw a 10x lift in conversion rate from app versus mobile web (2.56% vs 0.23%).

Higher average order values

App shoppers spend more. 

The data shows 10-50% higher AOV from app users compared to mobile web visitors, driven by deeper browsing sessions and stronger purchase intent.

Real revenue from push notifications

One brand generated over $31,000 in push notification revenue in its first month after turning on push campaigns, with nearly half from automated abandoned cart notifications alone. 

Across multiple brands, abandoned cart push notifications generate $10,000-$200,000+ in monthly revenue.

That’s just one campaign. And for all push notifications, there’s no marginal cost per send, making the revenue you gain from push campaigns much more profitable than other channels.

“The power of push notifications is so strong. In a world where people open email less and less each day, everyone is jumping into SMS which is crazy expensive, and people are starting to tune these out too, being able to do push notifications is the reason you do an app.”
— David Cost, VP of Ecommerce, Rainbow Shops

Engagement metrics reflecting habit formation

App users average 2.1-4.7 sessions per user (compared to roughly 1 session per mobile web visitor), with session times of 5-7 minutes. 

These aren’t one-time visitors. They’re repeat customers building a shopping habit.

Stronger lifetime value

App users deliver 2.8-5x higher CLV than web-only shoppers, and 60% of first-time app buyers go on to make at least one more purchase.

For an enterprise brand doing $50M+ in annual revenue, capturing even 10-15% of that through a mobile app channel (with higher conversion rates and AOV) represents a significant revenue opportunity.

How Do You Choose an Enterprise Mobile App Development Partner?

Vendor marketing in this space is thick. If you’re evaluating mobile app options for your enterprise ecommerce operation, here’s a framework for cutting through it:

Ask about your specific tech stack

Don’t accept “we integrate with 100+ tools” at face value. Provide your actual list of integrations and ask which ones will work in the app, which require additional development, and which won’t work at all. The answer tells you everything about the real cost and timeline.

Calculate the true total cost of ownership

For most agencies, custom builds and legacy software, the license fee or development quote is just the starting point. Factor in:

• Integration rebuilding costs ($30K-$50K per integration for custom dev)
• Ongoing maintenance (typically 15-20% of initial build cost per year for custom)
• Internal team resources required to manage the app
• Opportunity cost of a long development timeline

A website-to-app approach like Vendrux removes all of this; giving you a mobile app of similar quality, for a predictable monthly cost that’s negligible compared to what you’re already spending on software.

Test with your actual website

Ask for a preview or proof of concept built on your real website, not a demo app. You need to see how your integrations, checkout flow, and custom features behave inside the app.

Evaluate the support model

For enterprise, “support” means a named account manager, guaranteed SLAs, direct access to engineering for edge cases, and proactive monitoring. Anything less creates risk for a revenue-generating channel.

Understand the update cycle

How do website changes propagate to the app? Is there a delay? Do you need to request updates? The ideal answer is “instantly and automatically.”

“We don’t have to worry about the app. Vendrux handles everything on the backend, and our website updates are automatically reflected.”
— Nick Barbarise, Direct of IT, John Varvatos

Check App Store compliance track record

App Store review can be unpredictable, especially for ecommerce apps. Ask how many apps the vendor has submitted, what their approval rate looks like, and how they handle rejection. A vendor with thousands of approved apps will navigate this process more efficiently than one with dozens.

Next Steps

Vendrux works with enterprise ecommerce brands on Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, and fully custom stacks.

It’s the best way for most enterprise commerce brands to launch a mobile app.

The process is straightforward:

1. Book a strategy call. Share your website URL and discuss your goals, tech stack, and requirements. No commitment, no pressure. The call helps both sides assess fit.
2. Get a custom app preview. The Vendrux team builds a working preview of your native app so you can see exactly how your website looks, feels, and performs as an app.
3. Launch in 30 days. Vendrux handles everything from build to App Store submission to ongoing maintenance. Your app goes live on iOS and Android while your team stays focused on running the business.

Vendrux has built 2,000+ apps since 2013, including for enterprise brands like Bestseller, John Varvatos, and BuyBuyBaby. You get predictable pricing, with no revenue share, and a fully managed service to support your tech team and handle everything to do with the mobile app.

Book a free strategy call to see how your website can become a mobile app, and learn whether Vendrux is the right partner to make it happen.

If you’re running Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you have a ton of great mobile commerce tools at your disposal.

SFCC’s Composable Storefront is one example. It gives you the power to build a fast, mobile-optimized, modern user experience.

But the crucial step that’s missing: letting you launch a full, “real”, mobile app.

This article explains how far the Composable Storefront gets you, where a PWA stops and a native app begins, and how SFCC brands create native apps without duplicating their frontend investment.

What the SFCC Composable Storefront Actually Builds

The Composable Storefront is Salesforce’s headless commerce frontend framework for B2C Commerce. 

It bundles three components:

• PWA Kit: An open-source React/TypeScript framework for building storefront UIs. This is the code your developers write in.
• Managed Runtime: Salesforce’s serverless hosting platform that deploys and scales your storefront.
• SCAPI (Shopper Commerce API): The API layer connecting your storefront to B2C Commerce’s backend (product catalog, cart, checkout, customer accounts, inventory).

The output is a Progressive Web App: a server-side rendered React application delivered through a web browser. It includes service workers for caching, a web manifest for add-to-home-screen prompts, and fast page loads from server-side rendering.

A Progressive Web App is a strong upgrade over a standard website, particularly now, when the majority of ecommerce traffic comes on mobile.

However, it’s not the same as launching a true native app. A mobile app gets your brand in the App Stores, it gives you native push notifications, and a more intuitive (and thus more often used) path to install.

PWAs don’t.

Salesforce’s own Trailhead documentation acknowledges the distinction, noting that native apps “make sense when you want to drive higher engagement with your most loyal customer base.”

Where the PWA Stops and a Native App Begins

The Composable Storefront delivers a strong mobile web experience. For many SFCC brands, that raises the question: is a PWA enough, or do you need an actual native app?

The difference matters for ecommerce brands focused on retention and repeat purchases.

Distribution

A PWA lives in the browser. Customers access it through a URL, and may add it to their home screen if prompted. 

A native app lives in the App Store and Google Play, where customers discover it through search, get prompted to install it through smart banners, and see it alongside every other app on their phone.

Installability

PWAs can be “installed” in a way, by the user adding it to their home screen.

However, in practice, this rarely happens. It’s hard to find the option to add a PWA to your home screen (when did you last do this?), and is not as intuitive (or trusted) as a one-click install from the App Store.

Push Notifications

This is the biggest practical gap. 

Native apps send push notifications through Apple’s APNs and Google’s FCM, which reach virtually all opted-in users, at any time. Your notifications light up the user’s home screen, whatever they’re doing, making them one of the most direct, highest-visibility channels in ecommerce.

PWAs can send push notifications. However, they’re run via the browser. Which means they’re only sent when the browser is running, their appearance is different, and they’re limited on iOS.

Simply, PWA push notifications don’t pack the same kind of power as native push.

The Bottom Line on PWA vs Native

A PWA is an improved mobile website. A native app is a retention and engagement channel. 

They serve different purposes, and for SFCC brands with repeat-purchase customers, the native app is where lifetime value compounds.

How to Create a True Native App for Your SFCC Store

SFCC’s Composable Storefront is a great foundation for a native app.

It doesn’t get you all the way there – but it lets you create a mobile-friendly web store that can be easily extended into a mobile app.

There are a few ways you can go about this; from using your existing storefront to power the app, or using SFCC’s APIs to connect your backend to a custom frontend. 

Let’s have a look at how these options work now.

Extend Your Composable Storefront into a Native App

Here’s the most seamless option for most SFCC brands: take the web storefront you’ve already built and extend it into native iOS and Android apps.

Vendrux is the best way for Salesforce Commerce Cloud stores to launch a true mobile app.

With Vendrux, your Composable Storefront, the React application your team has invested in building and optimizing, becomes the foundation of native apps published in the App Store and Google Play. Every customization, third-party integration, and feature carries over because the app is powered by your actual storefront.

What you get:

• App Store and Google Play listings with your branding
• Native push notifications via OneSignal/Klaviyo
• Native navigation (tab bar, splash screens, deep linking)
• App-exclusive experiences (app-specific pages, discounts, products)
• Automatic updates: Changes to your Composable Storefront appear in the app without an app store update

This approach works especially well with the Composable Storefront because of how it extends your website, instead of rebuilding it.

Your storefront is already a high-performance React application. The mobile web experience you’ve built translates directly into the app experience. You’re not starting from scratch; you’re adding a native distribution layer on top of work you’ve already done.

“The app’s been invaluable to us. The cost we’re paying versus what we’re getting back is tenfold.”
— Nick Barbarise, Director of IT at John Varvatos (SFCC, 10x higher revenue per app user vs mobile web)

The timeline to launch is around 30 days, and the cost is likely in the low-four figures per month (see full details here). That makes it a far more cost-effective option than building a fully custom app (which can cost $250K+ upfront, and another six figures per year to maintain).

Build a Custom Native App Against SCAPI

If you want to go all out and build a fully custom native app, you can do that too.

You can use React Native, Flutter, or native Swift/Kotlin to build a completely separate frontend that connects to SCAPI for commerce data. This gives you full control over every pixel in your app, albeit with some trade-offs:

• Cost: $150,000-$500,000+ for the initial build, depending on complexity
• Timeline: 6-12+ months to launch
• Ongoing maintenance: A dedicated mobile development team managing a second codebase alongside your Composable Storefront
• Feature parity risk: Every feature, promotion, or redesign on your web storefront needs to be separately built in the native app
• SI coordination: Your SFCC implementation partner and your mobile development team need to stay aligned on API changes and commerce logic

A custom app could be an option if you need deep native functionality, or if you already have mobile app development expertise in-house.

Realistically, though, the app you get from a custom build isn’t going to be that much different from what you’d get if you extended your existing site into an app with Vendrux. However, you’d be paying 100x the price to do it.

Stay PWA-Only

If getting into the app stores isn’t a priority right now, the PWA capabilities built into the Composable Storefront may be sufficient as a starting point.

You get fast mobile web performance, offline page caching via service workers, and add-to-home-screen capability. 

It’s an upgrade for your website; and if you’re still working on getting more customers, or you have a relatively low share of customers shopping on mobile, it’s a solid starting point.

SFCC Mobile App Approaches: Side-by-Side Comparison

Final Thoughts

The SFCC Composable Storefront and a native mobile app aren’t competing choices. They’re complementary layers. 

The Composable Storefront handles your web storefront with a modern React architecture, fast performance, and the flexibility of headless commerce. A native app handles the retention channel: App Store presence, push notifications, and a permanent home screen icon for your most valuable customers.

Vendrux bridges the two. It extends your Salesforce Commerce Cloud storefront into native iOS and Android apps with every feature, customization, and integration intact. 

No second codebase, no separate development team, and updates to your Composable Storefront appear in the app automatically.

The app can be a powerful asset for your brand – apps deliver a major boost to repeat sales, and brands with their own app typically see outsized revenue contributions from their app users.

“Only about 5% of users are on the app, but they generate around 50% of sales.”
— Junior Couture team

Ready to take your Composable Storefront to the next level?

Book a free strategy call and we’ll show you your SFCC storefront as a native mobile app, and walk you through the process step-by-step.

Salesforce’s rebrand of Commerce Cloud to Agentforce Commerce in late 2025 wasn’t just cosmetic. Every major release since has been agent-first, shipping new AI capabilities for merchants.

These are exciting times for ecommerce, especially for SFCC merchants. Features like Personal Shopper, Merchant Agent, and Guided Shopping are transforming your web user experience. But in 2026, a great mobile website is not enough.

You need retention, ownership and reliable engagement. You need a mobile app. 

But integrating all the power of Agentforce into a new channel is not as easy as you’d hope it would be.

This article is going to walk through the potential that Agentforce Commerce brings for your brand, how mobile apps amplify Agentforce’s key features, and how Vendrux turns your existing SFCC storefront into a native app that brings every Agentforce feature with it.

What is Agentforce Commerce – And What Can It Do?

Agentforce Commerce is Salesforce’s suite of AI agents built on top of Commerce Cloud and grounded in Data Cloud.

These aren’t chatbots in the old sense. They reason across your catalog, inventory, customer profiles, and order history using the Atlas Reasoning Engine, then take action on behalf of the shopper or merchandiser.

Here are four of the biggest capabilities for SFCC merchants:

Personal Shopper

Personal Shopper is the flagship shopper-facing agent, available since February 2025. It handles natural-language product discovery, refines recommendations based on learned preferences, answers product questions in-conversation, and can complete checkout inside the chat window. It’s grounded in your catalog, inventory, reviews, and each shopper’s Data Cloud profile.

Pandora’s deployment gives a sense of what this looks like live. Their Personal Shopper, “Gemma,” handles jewelry discovery by occasion, recipient, and budget.

Paired with a service agent handling post-purchase questions, Pandora has reported a 10% NPS lift and meaningful call deflection.

Merchant Agent

This feature is merchandiser-facing rather than shopper-facing. Merchant Agent writes product descriptions at scale, generates promotions, flags slow-moving SKUs, and responds to natural-language requests like “boost underperforming outerwear in the US for the next two weeks.” 

The outputs flow to shoppers through the channels you already run: on-site banners, email, SMS, and push.

Guided Shopping

Guided Shopping is part of Agentforce for Retail. It covers product search, add-to-cart, reorder, and order tracking inside the same conversational interface, and is designed to collapse the multi-page browse journey into a single back-and-forth.

Intent-Aware Search

This is the successor to Einstein Search. Built on a commerce-tuned small language model (via Salesforce’s Cimulate acquisition), Intent-Aware Search interprets shopper intent conversationally rather than matching keywords. 

A query like “something for a beach wedding in Italy” returns styled, refined results instead of a literal keyword match.

These agents live as part of your storefront experience. They’re served through Commerce Cloud, grounded in Data Cloud, and rendered wherever your storefront renders.

Read more: SFCC Composable Storefront & Mobile Apps: How They Work Together

The Mobile App-Agentforce Synergy

Agentforce is powerful. It’s powerful for your web storefront. And it gets even more powerful when you have a mobile app.

All these AI-driven features excel at personalization and data-driven customer experiences, all of which align perfectly with mobile apps.

Here’s what happens when you extend your Agentforce storefront to a mobile app.

Persistent sessions make conversational commerce viable

Personal Shopper, Guided Shopping, and any conversational flow depend on session continuity. A shopper asks for a recommendation, switches to check a message, comes back, asks a follow-up. 

In a native app, the conversation remains. On mobile web, it often doesn’t. iOS Safari will background and evict tabs when memory is tight. A shopper switching apps can return to a reset session. Network changes between Wi-Fi and cellular can drop stateful connections. Each of these breaks the thread of a conversation the shopper and the agent were building together.

The whole point of a Personal Shopper is sustained context. An app gives the agent the environment to keep that context intact.

Push turns every Agentforce signal into an addressable action

Agentforce generates signals constantly: 

• Browse abandonment
• Slow-moving inventory Merchant Agent thinks should move
• Personalized promotions based on a shopper’s recent behavior. 
• Loyalty moments tied to reorder cadence

On web, those signals only reach a shopper who happens to be on your site when the signal fires. Everyone else sees them on their next visit, if they come back.

Native push notifications give Agentforce a direct line to the device. An agent identifies an intent, Data Cloud segments the audience, your Marketing Cloud journey fires a push message to the shopper which is virtually guaranteed to be seen.

The practical result: the hyper-personalized recommendations and promotions your Agentforce investment generates reach the shopper at the moment they matter, not only when the shopper happens to be on-site.

App sessions enrich Data Cloud

Data Cloud is what makes Agentforce smart. The more signal it has on each customer, the better every agent’s output.

A native app generates signal mobile web struggles to capture cleanly:

• Session frequency
• Time-in-app
• Which categories a shopper browses late at night versus at lunch
• Push engagement patterns
• In-app search queries

These events flow into Data Cloud, join the unified profile, and inform the next Personal Shopper recommendation, the next Merchant Agent promo, the next Journey Builder segment.

Your Agentforce investment compounds inside an app. The app is both a new delivery surface and a new data source.

The Mobile App Problem for Agentforce Commerce Stores

A mobile app is a powerful asset and engagement surface for any ecommerce brand, especially those running a modern storefront powered by Agentforce Commerce.

The problem? It also brings a lot of complexity that most brands would rather not have to take on.

Native app development is already a major project

Mobile app development takes a long time, costs a lot, and adds a huge amount of technical complexity to your stack.

A custom iOS and Android app means two codebases, separate development teams, and constant iterations, with all your teams scrambling to keep each channel in sync.

You’re looking at a timeline of possibly 12 to 18 months for an enterprise-grade build to go live, with a six or seven-figure investment – and recurring maintenance an ongoing line item after that.

Agentforce adds another integration layer

Custom mobile apps are already a huge investment, before you take into consideration the complexity of Agentforce storefronts.

A straightforward, no-frills shopping app may be easy enough to build. But bringing Agentforce into your app requires stitching together several SDKs.

Salesforce released the Agentforce Mobile SDK in June 2025, with iOS 17+ and Android API 29+ requirements. It handles the agent integration itself, but the surrounding infrastructure is separate work:

• MobilePush SDK for push delivery
• Data Cloud ingestion for the behavioral signals that make agents smarter
• Messaging for In-App for the chat surface
• Authentication and session plumbing that bridges your app to SLAS or your SFCC auth layer.

Four SDKs to integrate, version, secure, and maintain, each on its own release cadence.

The ongoing tax of feature parity

Agentforce is moving fast. Spring ’26 added two-way commerce messaging across email, SMS, and WhatsApp. More features are undoubtedly coming.

Each new capability Salesforce ships means a new dev cycle to integrate this in your app.

As your storefront evolves, you’re faced with the decision to either invest what’s needed to keep your app in line with your website, or sacrifice features from your app and let the user experience lag behind your site.

Neither choice is ideal.

Mobile apps are still a necessary channel

Despite the complexity of building – and, more notably, maintaining a mobile app, it’s still a channel you need to have.

Shoppers today are mobile first, and with the rising cost and unpredictability of most acquisition channels, dependable retention channels are essential.

If you want to stay close to your best customers, and reduce your reliance on paid ads and retented traffic channels, and if you want to present your brand as authoritative and trustworthy, you need a mobile app.

The question is how to find a manageable way to build it.

The Vendrux Solution for Agentforce Stores

For brands that don’t want to spend $250K+ on a custom, complex mobile app – but also don’t want to sacrifice the powerful features that Agentforce provides – Vendrux is the answer.

Vendrux turns your existing SFCC storefront into full-featured native iOS and Android apps. You maintain one codebase – your storefront. That storefront powers your app, with native navigation, push notifications, and a presence in the app stores and your customer’s home screen.

Every Agentforce feature you’ve configured on your storefront works in the app from day one, with zero additional integration. And you don’t need to worry about the problems of juggling another codebase.

A native app powered by your existing storefront

Vendrux gives you a true native app with native UI layered on top of your storefront: native tab bars, native menus, native transitions.

All your web features carry over, by default: SCAPI endpoints, your Page Designer content, your Adyen integration, your Algolia or Coveo search, your Agentforce widget configuration. It all continues to work exactly as they do on the web.

Every Agentforce feature carries over to your mobile app

Here’s the beauty about Vendrux’s approach: because your storefront is what the app renders, everything configured on your storefront (including Agentforce features) works in the app:

• The Personal Shopper chat widget, in its native place on your pages
• Guided Shopping flows, with the same add-to-cart, reorder, and order tracking behavior
• Intent-Aware Search, returning the same results through the same SCAPI calls
• Merchant Agent outputs, from generated product descriptions to flagged promotions

These are features that would usually take months to build, test and ship for a native app. With Vendrux, they work by default.

Your Agentforce investment extends to mobile as a byproduct of the app existing.

Native push for Agentforce-driven messaging

All the data signals generated by Agentforce become powerful, hyper-personalized signals for push notifications.

Browse abandonment, slow inventory, personalized promotions, loyalty moments. You use these to trigger automations, or to personalize your promotional campaigns, which already benefit from the direct, low-cost, high-visibility qualities of push as a channel.

One codebase, one team, one roadmap

The best part – you get the full power of Agentforce in your mobile app, without the downside of building and managing a new system.

You manage your website, and every new feature you build, configuration you tweak, improvement you ship, goes live in your mobile app automatically.

That automatic feature parity, without the added work of managing a separate storefront, is all the more important with the speed at which ecommerce is evolving today.

Vendrux is the only way to ensure your mobile app keeps up.

How Vendrux Works

Vendrux is the most effective way for SFCC brands to launch mobile apps. We power the mobile apps for numerous Salesforce brands, providing the ideal solution for global brands with complex setups to extend that setup to high-retention mobile apps.

Vendrux is a fully managed service. We handle everything to do with your mobile apps, including build, testing, publishing to the app stores, and ongoing maintenance after launch.

We create a native layer for your storefront, letting your existing website power a full-featured native app.

Your app and website are fully synced, meaning no feature gaps or lag between web and app, by definition. Build or design once, go live everywhere.

It’s a fraction of the cost of building a fully custom app, and significantly less operational overhead. 

You can go live in around 6-8 weeks – compare that to a custom native app, which can take 12+ months to launch. By that time, the Agentforce platform could look completely different.

Vendrux lets you build fast, and iterate faster, without sacrificing any of the features your mobile app needs.

SFCC brands running on Vendrux

Vendrux works with ecommerce brands across many different ecommerce platforms – but Salesforce Commerce brands are among our most notable partners.

• John Varvatos, a luxury menswear brand that runs on SFCC leverages Vendrux to deliver a VIP app experience for their top customers.
• Junior Couture, a luxury childrenswear retailer, who also is able to maintain a low-lift, high-impact surface for their most valuable customer segment.
• Bestseller, the fashion group behind Jack & Jones, Vero Moda, and over a dozen other brands runs Vendrux apps across its portfolio.

These are global, enterprise-level brands, who recognize that the best way to build and maintain a native ecommerce app is not a separate system, but an app fully synced and powered by their existing website.

See more Vendrux case studies here.

Agentic Commerce is the Future. Vendrux Helps You Keep Pace

Salesforce is not hedging on where Commerce Cloud is going. The platform is now called Agentforce Commerce. Every release is shipping agent capabilities first. The company’s roadmap is hyper-focused on building and broadening Agentforce features.

Agentic Commerce is not hype. It’s clear it’s the future of how businesses sell online.

Mobile apps extend this to a low-friction, personalized, contained surface for your best customers. And Vendrux is the most effective way to make this happen, particularly for complex storefronts, and brands who want to be able to move fast, without multiple dev cycles for every new feature.

Talk to our team to learn how to extend your Agentforce investment into a full-featured native app. Book a free consultation, or get a free preview of your app to see what’s possible.

The hardest part of launching a mobile app for an enterprise or legacy ecommerce site has nothing to do with UX, push strategy, or getting installs. The ecommerce mobile app challenges that block these projects are structural, and they live in your stack.

If you’re not running a six-month-old DTC site on Shopify with a stock theme, if your site has custom features, niche integrations, or a complex tech stack, your path to a mobile app can look cloudy at best.

At Vendrux, we’ve spent over 10 years working with online brands, including brands with sites built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce Enterprise, Shopware, or custom stacks.

In that time, we’ve talked to thousands of people, hearing countless challenges and reasons why the standard mobile app solutions didn’t work for them.

Below, we break down everything we’ve learned, and what you can do to get past these challenges and launch the perfect mobile app.

Challenge One: Custom-Built Storefront Logic

Some of the hardest features to translate to a mobile app are the ones the customer doesn’t even think of as “features.” They’re how the website works and runs under the hood.

Custom JavaScript, custom code on top of a platform, third-party widgets stitched together over years of releases. This kind of thing powers your website, but when you build a mobile app, you’re often working with a brand new codebase where all of this logic needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

Here are a few examples:

Custom and Heavily Modified Checkouts

Most enterprise or legacy sites have custom checkouts that do a lot of heavy lifting.

• Custom fields capture B2B PO numbers.
• Regional payment routing decides between Stripe, Adyen, and Mercado Pago based on country.
• Fraud rules built on top of Signifyd or Sift tag risky orders before they hit fulfillment. 

There’s usually an A/B test that ran for six months and kept the variant. Sometimes a discount engine fires conditionally based on cart composition.

Checkout is possibly the most important part of your site. It’s where you get paid. If you’ve spent years perfecting this, you don’t want to have to swap it out in your app for a plain vanilla checkout.

Custom Product Configurators and Specialty Flows

Selling simple, standard products is easy. But what about if each product requires specific inputs from the customer?

• Eyewear sites collect prescription data.
• Pharmacies handle prescription upload and pharmacist verification.
• Jewelry sites configure ring size, gem type, and engraving in a single flow.
• Subscription boxes start with a quiz and end with a curated bundle.
• Made-to-order furniture brands collect dimensions and finishes that tie into a manufacturing system.

Each one is built either as a custom platform extension or as homegrown JavaScript on top of your storefront. You’ve built it to work well on the web, but getting these custom features to carry over to a mobile app often means building a new feature from scratch.

Custom Loyalty, Tiers, and Gift-with-Purchase Rules

Everyone has a loyalty program. And simple loyalty programs are easy to carry over to an app.

But what if your loyalty program isn’t the same as everyone else’s? Just a few niche, brand-specific rules can cause problems.

• “Spend $150, get a free travel-size from the new collection.”
• “Gold tier customers see exclusive products for 24 hours before launch.”
• “Earn double points on app purchases this month.”

You’ve likely built customizations into your program via the web, whether it’s with an app like Yotpo or LoyaltyLion, or a custom-built feature.

But extending this further, to a new environment (an app) adds a whole new layer of complexity.

Challenge Two: Multi-Stack, Multi-Region, Multi-Customer Setups

The bigger and more established your brand, the less likely your storefront looks like a simple, “out of the box” Shopify store.

Maybe you’re selling in five different countries. Maybe you have B2B and B2C on the same site, with different storefronts and customer accounts. Maybe you’re running multiple brands under one parent company and want one app to serve each store. Each one of these adds layers that off-the-shelf app builders weren’t designed for.

Here are some of the multi-storefront setups we typically see:

Multiple Regional Storefronts (Often on Different Platforms)

A brand sells in five countries. The US storefront runs on Shopify Plus. The Latin America storefronts run on VTEX. The European storefronts run on Magento or Adobe Commerce or PrestaShop.

Yet the customer experience needs to feel unified: one app, the user picks a country on first launch and gets the right storefront.

Most app builders force you to build one app per storefront. Five regions means five App Store listings, five Play Store listings, five review processes, five sets of marketing pushes. The cost of running all those apps gets huge fast.

B2B and B2C on the Same Brand

Selling B2B and B2C tends to be very different.

With B2B ecommerce, you have things like:

• Customer-specific pricing
• Net 30 terms
• PO number fields at checkout
• Tax-exempt certificates on file
• Sales reps placing orders on behalf of accounts

If you’re a brand with both B2B and B2C operations, it’s not uncommon to have completely different backends powering each one. Yet you may want all of this to fit into one, unified app (with perhaps a switcher that allows the user to choose which store to shop from).

Same thing goes for retail/wholesale, stores with new products and trade-ins, or any kind of business with multiple buying paths. This becomes very complicated to transfer into an app.

Multi-Brand Retail Groups

Your company might operate multiple brands, with their own sites under separate URLs – yet you want a customer to be able to download one app, and shop from all your brands, without having to download 10 different apps.

Most of the time, building one app that includes several different branded sites will be a nightmare. Standard mobile app builders almost certainly won’t be able to handle this kind of complexity.

Challenge Three: Complex Backend Systems

Your site’s UI is just the tip of the iceberg. What really runs your ecommerce operation is the 95% below the surface. 

It’s your tech stack that includes ERPs, order management systems, product information management platforms, custom inventory feeds.

This is what powers your website. Getting it to do the same for a mobile app is a major challenge.

ERP, OMS, and PIM Tie-Ins

For enterprise and legacy brands, the catalog, real pricing, and authoritative inventory live platforms like SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, or a custom OMS. Your storefront pulls from those systems through middleware that took years to stabilize.

Making this work with a mobile app means a lot of custom development. Off-the-shelf app builders are built to work with public APIs from Shopify, WooCommerce etc. They aren’t built for legacy systems like these.

Real-Time Inventory, BOPIS, and Omnichannel

For simple ecommerce stores, where the customer enters their address, pays, and you deliver the item, building an ordering flow is simple, no matter the surface.

When you have non-standard purchasing options, it gets a lot more difficult.

Perhaps you have physical stores, and you want to allow “Buy online, pickup in store” (BOPIS), or you need to sync inventory between online and physical. Perhaps you want to show which stores are in stock of a certain item.

You’ve built the systems to accommodate this on your site – but with an app, you’re often forced to build and integrate this all over again.

Headless and Composable Architectures

The common conception about headless and composable stacks (Hydrogen, Next.js, a custom front end) is that it makes it easier to ship a mobile app.

In a way, it is. It’s easier than integrating a custom React Native app with a stock Shopify or WooCommerce store. But it’s still a whole rebuild of your frontend, and basically a new storefront you need to manage.

All this when your mobile website almost certainly offers a great user experience already. Yet you’re building a whole new React Native or Flutter app, and juggling 20 APIs, just to rebuild what already works.

Challenge Four: Regulated and Specialty Industries

Some industries come with rules. Age verification at the start of a session, ID checks at delivery, prescription handling, App Store policy restrictions on what you can sell or how you can describe it.

Each one adds a layer that off-the-shelf app builders weren’t designed for, and a new thing that has to be built into custom mobile apps.

Age Verification and ID Checks

If you sell alcohol, cannabis, vape, tobacco, or adult products, your site already has age gates and often ID verification at delivery.

Sometimes the rules go further:

• State-by-state ship-to restrictions
• Signature on file at delivery
• Federally controlled-substance tracking
• Hard caps on quantity per customer

It’s a massive can of worms. Compliance is the entire game, and an inflexible app builder may just not be able to keep up with what you need in order to operate.

Pharmacy, Prescriptions, and HIPAA

Pharmacy brands handle prescription uploads, pharmacist verification, controlled-substance flows, HIPAA in the US, and sometimes telehealth before purchase. 

These features are far from standard – and they’re also non-negotiables. You can’t cut corners and ship an app in a new system that doesn’t support the regulatory red tape your business is governed by.

Challenge Five: Content, Community, and Discovery Layers

Modern ecommerce isn’t just product listings and a checkout. It’s quiz funnels, AR try-on, editorial content, UGC feeds, live chat, and reviews loaded with photos and videos. 

The more layers your site has, the more chance that something breaks or goes missing in your app.

Quiz-Based Product Discovery

Branded quizzes (Octane AI, Shop Quiz, custom flows) are often your brand’s highest-converting funnel.

Yet it’s a non-standard feature. You can build these kind of unique quiz experiences when you’re working with the flexibility of the web, but a template-based app is not set up for this kind of thing.

AR Try-On and 3D Viewers

Eyewear, jewelry, cosmetics, furniture. Modiface, Zakeke 3D, Threekit. AR try-on and 3D product viewing have become standard in several categories.

These vendors’ web embeds usually break in builder containers. A custom native build means integrating each AR vendor’s separate SDK, which is a meaningful engineering project on its own and another integration to maintain forever.

Custom UGC Feeds, Shoppable Video, and AI Personalization

Every site has simple UGC, reviews, other widgets (Yotpo reviews, Gorgias chat, Okendo Q&A) that are easy to transfer over to a mobile app.

How about when you go a step further, to create a truly unique shopping journey for your customers?

• A custom UGC or social feed your team built into the site (community galleries, photo-tag-and-shop, member content streams)
• Shoppable video, live shopping
• AI-driven personalization
• Interactive communities, forums, or multimedia experiences built directly into the storefront

These are all non-standard features that likely aren’t supported by a standard app builder, and bring a lot of work to integrate with a custom app build.

The alternative is settling for a vanilla customer experience in your app… which is far from ideal if you’re trying to convince people to make this their go-to buying channel.

Challenge Six: Marketplaces and Multi-Vendor Sites

If your site is a marketplace, with multiple sellers each running their own catalog, shipping, and policies, the complexity multiplies for any mobile app project.

Multi-Vendor Catalogs and Per-Vendor Rules

Each vendor on a marketplace runs their own catalog, ratings, shipping, return policies, and sometimes their own pricing rules. Your app has to surface all of this consistently across vendors, while making it clear to customers who they’re buying from.

App builders are designed for single-storefront brands. Multi-vendor logic typically isn’t supported, or only works through awkward workarounds.

Split Shipping and Per-Vendor Logistics

A single cart with items from three vendors becomes three packages, three shipping methods, three tracking numbers.

Most app builders treat the cart as one shipment. Customers see one tracking link, then packages arrive at random times from different vendors, and your support inbox blows up.

Vendor-Specific Policies

Different vendors have different return windows, restock fees, and final-sale flags. Your app has to communicate these accurately at checkout, or you end up creating disputes that drain your CX team.

A custom native build can handle marketplace logic, but it’s a major engineering project on top of the marketplace platform itself (Mirakl, Sharetribe, custom). You’re effectively building a second marketplace front end, just for the app.

Why These Edge Cases Cause Problems When You Want to Launch a Mobile App

There are many great ways to build a mobile app for sites with straightforward product catalogs and basic backends.

In fact, mobile apps have never been more accessible – just pay ~$100/mo for a no-code tool and ship something in a few days.

The trouble comes when you try to ship a mobile app for a serious brand with a deep tech stack, custom web features, or any of the niche cases outlined above.

That’s when things break (or the cost gets prohibitive).

No-Code Tools Aren’t Built for Custom Stores

By nature, all the no-code app builders made for ecommerce have limited flexibility.

They’re built for clean, standard setups. A simple Shopify or WooCommerce store. The moment you have custom logic, you usually fall outside what they support.

• Custom checkouts get replaced with a vanilla checkout.
• Product configurators don’t work.
• Multi-storefront sites aren’t compatible
• Custom backend logic doesn’t work with the app

There’s nothing wrong with these tools. They’re great at what they do.

But the nature of a SaaS tool is that it’s never going to have the flexibility to work with highly customized sites or those that fall outside of the norm. They’re built for the 80% – not the 20%.

Custom App Development is Expensive (and Scales with Complexity)

Building custom apps from scratch means you can build basically anything. But the problem is, you’re rebuilding everything from the ground up.

Even a straightforward ecommerce app is going to take six figures plus, and at least six months to go live.

And every edge case, custom feature, backend quirk adds to the difficulty, which adds to the time it takes, which adds to the cost.

Building from scratch also adds a massive amount of ongoing complexity, because now you’re managing two distinct systems.

Your web team ships a feature; now your app team has to ship it too. Forever. The result is two codebases that drift apart, with the app falling behind the website over time.

We’ve seen this pattern hundreds of times before. A brand builds a custom native app, because the off-the-shelf choices don’t work for them. But before long, it just becomes too much work to maintain, and the app gets forgotten, and stops being maintained.

How to Build a Mobile App That Works in Sync With Your Custom Website

You’ve built a powerful ecommerce engine on the web. You want an app. But you don’t want to have to rebuild from scratch.

You should be able to extend that into a mobile app, while using the same tech stack and workflows you’ve committed to for the web.

Vendrux is a better way to build a custom mobile app.

You get an app that integrates perfectly with all your web features, backend logic, and any other niche cases that ruled out mass-market app builders.

The app runs on top of your existing codebase. You still get all the native features you expect in an app (push notifications, native UI, splash screens, deep linking…), but you manage everything from your website – not two different platforms.

You can customize the app as much as you need to; building app-exclusive experiences, a different homepage for the app, custom pricing or promotions in the app. 

Vendrux’s team does everything for you on the app side, and works with you to set up the necessary customizations you need, allowing you to build and manage custom features through your website, and have these work in the app.

It’s just an easier way to build a custom app. It’s how global brands like Bestseller (Jack & Jones, Vero Moda, Only & Sons), John Varvatos, and many others were able to launch mobile apps risk-free, without moving away from their custom web platforms.

Match the App to Your Stack, Not the Other Way Around

For enterprise and legacy brands, the ecommerce mobile app challenges that block a launch are structural. 

Custom checkout, multi-region, B2B, ERP, loyalty, omnichannel: the things that power your business are also the things that block off-the-shelf app builders and inflate the cost and difficulty of building an app from scratch.

Vendrux lets you launch a mobile app while keeping all the complexity of your website intact, without rebuilding everything from the ground up.

Book a demo to see more about how it works, and chat with our app experts about how turn your site into the full-featured mobile app your brand deserves.

If you run a non-Shopify ecommerce store, you’re often made to feel like an outsider.

Everything you read online is pitched towards Shopify these days. That includes Shopify-specific mobile app builders like Tapcart (as well as the throngs of similar apps in the Shopify App Store).

If you’re on a custom platform (or even a relatively straightforward WooCommerce store), you’re often told the only way to get a mobile app is to commit to a custom build from scratch; something that will cost you six figures and six to twelve months of your time, just for version 1.

There’s a better way, though – no matter how custom or niche your ecommerce platform is. Keep reading and we’ll explain it all.

Most of Ecommerce Is Not on Shopify

The “Shopify is everywhere” reflex doesn’t hold up against the actual platform numbers.

Shopify is the largest single ecommerce platform in the United States, with roughly 30% of US platform share, and about 10% of the global market by share of websites (Statista, Chargeflow, 2025-2026). 

That’s big, but not a monopoly. The other 70-90%, depending on which lens you take, runs on a long list of platforms that look very different from each other.

WooCommerce alone covers an estimated 4.7 million active stores, somewhere between 18% and 21% of global ecommerce websites.

Add the Magento and Adobe Commerce ecosystem (with Hyvä now powering 6,400+ live stores after going open source in November 2025), Shopware, BigCommerce, and the long tail of custom and headless stacks running on commercetools, MedusaJS, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, VTEX, and bespoke builds. Together, they power the majority of online revenue worldwide.

Shopify is certainly the leading player in the ecommerce platform market. But it’s not the only player in the game, and brands not on Shopify are not the minority.

Where the Non-Shopify Majority Lives

Non-Shopify ecommerce isn’t a single archetype. It splits into a handful of clear patterns, each with its own reasons for being where it is.

B2B Distributors and Manufacturers

Complex B2B is where Shopify Plus has historically struggled, and where Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Shopware, Salesforce B2B Commerce, SAP, and ERP-integrated custom builds have entrenched themselves. 

These aren’t catalogs with company logins bolted on. They’re hierarchies, contracted pricing, sales rep accounts, quote-to-order workflows, and customer-specific catalogs running across thousands of accounts at once.

The brands actually running these stacks tell the story. 

• REDARC, an Australian automotive electronics manufacturer, runs both its B2B distributor portal and its DTC channel on Adobe Commerce. 
• Bio-Rad, a life-sciences and clinical diagnostics company, runs a headless ecommerce setup on BigCommerce. 
• Prime-Line, a US hardware and replacement-parts manufacturer, sells through wholesale and direct on BigCommerce. 

Each is a real B2B operation, not a B2C store with a discount tier.

A mobile app on top of any of these has to respect that complexity. Most off-the-shelf app builders simply don’t.

Enterprise and Legacy Stacks

Large-scale ecommerce that pre-dates Shopify Plus is where the deepest non-Shopify investment lives. Adobe Commerce (the platform formerly known as Magento) still powers serious D2C operations: 

HanesBrands runs its apparel business on Adobe Commerce; Catbird, a Brooklyn fine-jewelry brand, runs the same stack; Coca-Cola’s En Tu Hogar D2C delivery business sits on it as well.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud carries a comparable list of premium and global brands. PUMA, YETI, Sonos, Fisher & Paykel, and Boggi Milano all run their commerce there. 

Shopware powers the European DTC and mid-market layer that rarely makes US headlines but matters across DACH and the UK: STABILO (the global writing-instruments manufacturer), ARMEDANGELS (Cologne-based sustainable fashion label), Casey’s Furniture (Irish heritage retailer founded in 1921), and MissPompadour (European premium-paint DTC brand).

These merchants spent years and a meaningful budget building the commerce stack they want. They aren’t shopping for a re-platform. They want their next channel, the mobile app, to extend what they already run.

Audience-First Publishers and Content-Led Brands

WooCommerce dominates a category Shopify isn’t built for: the audience-first brand whose store is downstream of their content. 

Publishers, creator businesses, membership communities, niche retailers built on a decade of organic traffic. The moat is the WordPress plugin ecosystem and the content already ranking; standardizing on a SaaS storefront usually destroys more value than it creates.

The pattern shows up in case after case. The official All Blacks rugby team shop runs on WooCommerce. Tiny Wood Stove, a US specialty retailer in a deeply niche category, scaled from a WordPress blog about wood-burning stoves into a multi-million-dollar business on the same plugin stack. 

The Woo merchant typically built the audience first and added the cart later, which is the inverse of how Shopify-native businesses are wired.

Custom and Headless Stacks

At the top of the market, you increasingly see brands picking custom or headless commerce: commercetools, MedusaJS, BigCommerce’s Catalyst framework, or fully bespoke implementations. 

L.L.Bean, a heritage US outdoor retailer, runs its digital business on commercetools. PetSmart, Breville, Pet Valu, and FREITAG (the Swiss upcycled-tarp bag brand built around a circular-economy thesis) are all on commercetools as well. 

Tekla Fabrics, the Copenhagen home-textiles brand, runs on MedusaJS. The teams here have engineering depth and want commerce as APIs, not as a hosted theme.

In short: the merchants that aren’t on Shopify aren’t fringe cases. They’re the legacy, the enterprise, the regulated, the content-first, the global, and the technically ambitious. They span most of ecommerce by revenue and a clear majority by store count.

Why Mobile Apps Are Harder to Build Off Shopify

Now the harder problem. There are 96 apps currently listed on the Shopify App Store under “mobile app builders”.

If you’re outside the Shopify ecosystem, the mobile app market doesn’t really exist for you in the same way it does for Shopify merchants.

There are two reasons this ecosystem is so much stronger for Shopify.

The first is APIs. Shopify’s Storefront API and Admin API are clean, well-documented, and consistent across stores. 

There are some limitations that come with the Shopify APIs, but in general, it’s the foundation for all these software tools that let straightforward Shopify stores launch apps quickly and easily.

Off Shopify, the picture is a lot more fragmented.

• WooCommerce APIs vary by plugin stack.
• Magento has REST and GraphQL but they behave differently across customizations. 
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud uses OCAPI and SCAPI. 
• Shopware has its own. 
• BigCommerce ships its own. 
• Custom and headless stacks expose whatever the team built. 

In short, there’s no single API a vendor can build a generic mobile app product on top of. If you were building the “Tapcart for non-Shopify”, it would mean working with so many different APIs, the complexity just would not be worth it.

The second is the kind of brands that run off-Shopify.

These brands are generally running more complex operations (which is why they’re not on Shopify in the first place). B2B, multi-storefront operations, bespoke implementations.

This makes it a lot more difficult to work with a generic mobile app builder SaaS, and the output is unlikely to measure up to the custom work you’ve done on your website.

The result is that you’re usually forced to build a custom app from the ground up to match your custom site – which comes at a huge cost (in both time and money), as well as shackling you to a new, separate codebase, massively increasing overhead complexity.

An App Still Matters, Even If the Build Path Looks Hostile

For non-Shopify stores, launching a mobile app looks like a dark and scary road. Yet, as most businesses will agree, a mobile app is still a crucial asset to have.

We’ve talked to many of them. We’ve heard from countless non-Shopify brands, who have a mobile app (often via the custom “from scratch” path), yet it fell into disrepair because it was just too much work to maintain, or the version they got was too limited or too buggy.

An app can deliver significant results, especially for the kind of businesses that run on legacy or enterprise ecommerce platforms.

We’re talking B2B brands (an industry where apps are essential), global retailers (where an app is a crucial brand asset), businesses doing 8 and 9 figures in annual revenue (where an app could easily be a $10M+ revenue channel).

So, although it may be difficult, you do need an app. The question is just how to build one, without feeling like you’ve got a whole new storefront to manage.

How Vendrux Builds Custom Mobile Apps for Any Stack

This is where Vendrux fits, and how it differs from everything in the “app builder” category.

Vendrux is a custom development partner that is the ideal midpoint between app builders and custom app development agencies.

We help you build a custom app using your existing web stack. Whether that’s Shopware, BigCommerce, Medusa, or a fully custom site – we’ll ship a native app for you that’s completely synced with your existing website.

You get a full-featured native app, with native push notifications, in-app onboarding flows, app-only experiences and exclusive offers, App Store and Play Store listings under your developer accounts. 

Everything a shopper would expect from a native app from a brand of your size.

The big difference is, you’re not rebuilding your store in a brand new codebase. The app is powered by your website, so everything you build for the web carries over to your app, automatically.

This model is platform-agnostic, which is the part that matters here. Vendrux apps can run on top of:

• WooCommerce stores, including custom plugin stacks
• Magento and Adobe Commerce, including Hyvä-themed and Mage-OS open source builds
• Shopware, including B2B-focused configurations
• BigCommerce, including Catalyst headless setups
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud, including B2C, B2B, and Agentforce-powered storefronts
• MedusaJS and other custom or headless commerce stacks
• Custom builds on bespoke architectures

Since you’re not rebuilding from scratch, you can launch much faster and more affordably than a traditional custom build. And more importantly, you don’t need to maintain a second codebase, which avoids the biggest trap that plagues most native apps.

“A custom app build for our Salesforce Commerce Cloud setup would have been prohibitively expensive. Vendrux was the only realistic option.”
‍— Nick Barbarise, Director of IT, John Varvatos

For non-Shopify ecommerce, this is the only way to get a real custom mobile app without funding two codebases for the lifetime of the app.

Migration Insurance: Your App Keeps Working If Your Platform Changes

Another thing to keep in mind: if you do happen to join the migration to Shopify, you don’t need to worry about uprooting and breaking your mobile app.

There are no APIs that need reconfiguring. No dealing with a vendor that worked with your old platform, but not your new one.

Since Vendrux is platform-agnostic, we can power your app if you’re on BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Shopify Plus – no matter where you go.

That’s the ultimate flexibility. Not being tied down to a specific tech stack, that multiplies complexity should you ever plan on moving.

The Other 80% Deserves a Real Mobile App Too

If you’re outside the Shopify ecosystem, the mobile app conversation has been broken for a long time. 

The defaults pointed you at custom builds you didn’t want, with budgets you didn’t have, on timelines that didn’t fit your business. The other 80% has been told the only way to a real app is to spend like an enterprise and live with the tax forever after.

That’s no longer true. The custom app your brand needs can be built on top of the web stack you already run, in around 30 days, for a fraction of what a from-scratch build would cost, and it travels with you if you ever move platforms.

Book a free strategy call to scope out the project, get a preview of your site as an app, and figure out if this is the right way to launch your mobile app.