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The biggest pushback I see online when someone suggests you should launch a mobile app (or asks for recommendations on how to launch one) is something along the lines of “why? No one uses apps.”

But “do customers use retail apps” isn’t quite the question most operators are really asking. The real version is closer to “do enough of MY customers use apps to make this worth doing for my store?” 

That version has a more interesting answer.

And the short answer: while there’s some truth behind the objection – a lot of shoppers are not going to download your app – there’s a subset of customers who will, and that segment does not need to be very large to justify the decision to build one.

Here’s who uses retail apps, why people like to claim that “nobody uses apps”, what the slice of your customers who would install your app looks like, and what the math comes out to for a $10M-revenue brand thinking about the channel.

Yes, Customers Do Use Retail Apps

Shopping apps are mainstream consumer behavior in the US and globally. The data is unambiguous.

A 2022 NewStore survey of 610 American consumers found that 88% have at least one mobile shopping app installed on their phone, half have four or more, and 9% have more than ten. 

31% prefer shopping in-app over shopping in-store or via mobile or desktop web. Among consumers under 44, the percentage of people with at least one shopping app on their phone hits 96%, and shopping apps rank as the preferred shopping method for the segment.

Research from ironSource puts the engagement number higher: 90% of consumers have multiple shopping apps on their phones, and 95% use at least one of those apps at least once a month. 

Two-thirds of respondents named a shopping app among their top ten most-used apps.

In-store behavior tracks the same way. According to Airship research reported by eMarketer, 74% of consumers worldwide use a retailer’s app while they’re shopping in a physical store, up from 65% the year before. eMarketer also forecasts that two-thirds of US smartphone users will use shopping or retail apps by 2025.

If you look at some of the biggest names in retail, it’s clear that at least some people use retail apps. 

Amazon’s shopping app sits at around 197 million monthly active users globally, with most of them in the United States. 

The app isn’t a niche channel for Amazon; it’s the dominant way Amazon’s customers interact with the brand. 

Other big-name retailers (Walmart, Target, Sephora, Nike, Shein, Temu) are pulling enormous in-app volume, and the same pattern shows up at a smaller scale in DTC.

The existence question is settled. The interesting question is who those users are.

The “Nobody Uses Apps” Misconception (And Why You Feel This Way)

This is what I often see on Reddit, on LinkedIn posts, and other places online.

One person asks for recommendations on how to build an app for their store. The peanut gallery scoffs at why they’d want to do such a thing in the first place.

The thing is, the objection is not totally random. It’s based on a few core misconceptions related to mobile apps and consumer shopping behavior.

1. “I Don’t Use Apps”

The first is the “I don’t use retail apps” projection. 

Your personal phone is one data point; your customer base is not. People who manage ecommerce stores tend to skew toward direct, intentional shopping behavior on the web.

People who buy from those stores skew toward whatever channel makes the next purchase easier. The 88% of US consumers with a shopping app installed includes plenty of people who would tell you, if asked in passing, that they don’t really use shopping apps.

2. “Hardly Anyone Will Use It”

The second is the “most of my customers won’t download the app” reasoning. 

That’s actually true. Most of your customers won’t download the app.

Typical install rates land between 5% and 20% of the active customer base. But that hides what that small share represents: the brand’s highest-LTV customers, the ones who’ve already bought repeatedly and want a faster way to keep buying. 

A small slice of your total customer base routinely produces a disproportionate share of brand revenue through the app. The install rate is a small input feeding a much larger output.

3. “Apps Are Useless”

The third idea is the “what does an app even add for the customer” objection. (see Reddit comments above)

It’s assuming that launching an app is completely self-serving; that convincing someone to download your app is just a con job so you can ruin their life with spam notifications.

Apps provide real value for certain customers.

• Quicker, more convenient access to your store (one tap from the home screen)
• A smoother shopping experience (not affected by whatever the latest thing iOS did to break Safari)
• Direct updates from the brand about promos, new products, other perks (some customers actually do want to hear from brands)
• A user experience built for returning customers (a brand’s website is often optimized to convert new customers; an app can be built to make it easier for regular customers to reorder/discover new products)
• VIP perks (many brands use the app as a defacto VIP list, giving app users first dibs on promos or product drops)

There’s a lot you can do in a new channel – especially when you can optimize every part of the user experience for people who already know your brand.

Who Uses Retail Apps

The through-line with all the common objections about mobile apps is that it assumes you’re launching one for everyone; that your goal is to have as many app users as email subscribers.

The customers who install a brand’s mobile app are typically a small slice of the total customer base – often under 10%, sometimes 15-20% for brands where repeat purchases are natural (F&B, beauty).

That segment is the most valuable segment a brand has.

They’ve already bought, usually more than once. They liked the brand enough to install the app. They self-select toward the lower-friction channel because they want to buy from this brand more often, faster, with fewer steps.

For these customers, the app does provide real value. They do want to receive push notifications. They want a more convenient way to interact with the brand, to buy from the brand.

David Cost, VP of Ecommerce at Rainbow Shops, said this (which sums up the case for mobile apps perfectly:

“In our experience, users break into two camps. There are users who prefer to buy on the app and users who prefer using the browser. You can’t convince one to go the other way, you need to meet them where they are.

Our apps never had any functionality or usability beyond the web experience. The reason to have an app is not to have something that isn’t on the website, but for people who prefer that way to access Rainbow content.”

The key line? “You need to meet them where they are.”

Some people just prefer to use apps. Some specifically want an app from the brands they visit the most.

You’re just giving them what they want.

The Impact of Giving Your Best Customers an App 

When you give your best customers what they want, you see some real, positive results that make launching it more than worthwhile (even if only a small share of your customers download it).

This is where the incrementality debate comes in – and is again disproven.

When you offer an app, the customers who download it:

• Shop more often (since it’s easier, less friction to come back to your store)
• Shop for longer (because the shopping experience is smoother, with fewer distractions)
• Convert more, spend more in each order (because of the improved user experience, tailored to repeat customers)
• Churn less (the app icon keeps your brand top of mind. Customers who otherwise might have stopped buying from you, out of atrophy, stay for longer)

The last one might be the most important; someone who downloads your app is inherently more valuable to your brand, because they had the kind of intent to want to download your app in the first place.

But without consistent touchpoints, brand loyalty atrophies, even for once hyper-engaged customers.

App users have stronger revenue metrics across the board (see our Ecommerce Mobile App Benchmark Report for more on this).

And the most important metric that improves is LTV – which often just comes from holding on to your best customers for longer, which naturally leads to more revenue and stronger profit margins over time.

The Math: Even Small Adoption Pays Off

We mentioned up top that you don’t need a large slice of your customer base to download the app in order for it to be a success.

Here’s the math to show what we mean.

Take a $10M-revenue ecommerce brand. Assume 5% of the total customer base installs and uses the app (that’s deliberately conservative by the way).

That 5% naturally spends more; partly because of the better experience in the app, partly because they’re just wired to spend more from the average customer.

Brands we work with always see a disproportionate revenue contribution from app users. So if 5% of your customers use the app, it’s likely that you’ll see at least 10% of total revenue come through the app – closer to 15-20% in most cases.

(the disparity can be even greater. Junior Couture saw 50% of their peak season revenue through the app, from just 5% of their customers. Pharmazone gets 63% of their online revenue through their app, from around 15% of their customers).

So if we take the deliberately conservative estimates – 5% of your customers contributing 10% of total revenue – the mobile app for a $10M brand is a sales channel doing $1M annually.

It comes out to the same figure for a brand half the size ($5M annually) doing stronger in their app (20% of total revenue – which is in the midpoint of the 10-35% average revenue share we generally see from apps).

Cost to Revenue (ROI) of the App

It shouldn’t be hard to see the value in a channel contributing $1M in annual revenue.

But the case gets even better if you take the cost into account.

With Vendrux, the cost to build and maintain your app starts at $1,499 per month, with a one-time, four-figure setup fee upfront.

That’s nearly $100K in monthly revenue, on a cost of a little over a thousand per month. With Vendrux, everything’s done for you, there’s no separate system to manage, and no major workflow changes coming along with your app.

That cost to benefit math makes having an app a no-brainer.

The Straight Answer

Yes, customers really do use retail apps.

They use the apps from massive brands like Amazon, Sephora, Gymshark. They also use apps from smaller brands, brands that aren’t household names, but are well-known in smaller ecommerce niches like men’s grooming and skincare, or clean protein and fitness supplements.

The big misconception is the idea that you’re launching an app for everyone. You’re not.

An app is for a small slice of a brand’s customer base. The most engaged, the most dialed in to the brand.

That could only be 5% of their total active customer base. But 5% is more than enough to make an app worthwhile.

If you’re a brand doing seven figures plus and see the case – or if you need more convincing – get in touch with us.

Book a free strategy call and we’ll walk through it with you, show you what an app could look like, and help you decide if launching a mobile app is the right move for your brand. 

Replatforming is one of the biggest technical projects you’ll ever run. A Magento to Shopify Plus migration takes 12 to 24 weeks for a mid-sized brand, longer for complex catalogs. It’s the kind of thing that occupies all your engineering team’s attention, and requires intense planning and management to ensure your customers aren’t negatively impacted by the move.

There’s one major issue we keep hearing about brands running into when they’re migrating their ecommerce platform: their app.

The brand has a mobile app, which is tied to their original web platform. Migrating often means the app breaks; or requires a significant rebuild for the new platform, which adds to what is already an engineering and logistical slog.

It’s never your primary concern. But it’s a significant one, all the more concerning if you have users on your app already, who you don’t want to disrupt.

Keep reading and we’ll share the same advice we share with people from replatform brands that we’ve been talking to lately, on how to handle this tricky situation.

The Problem: Why a Platform Migration Breaks Your App

Whichever platforms you’re migrating to/from, and however your app is built, a replatform typically means your app will break.

Your web platform and app are (or should be) tied together. They share from the same commerce backend. Inventory, orders, product details, accounts, all of this is connected, typically via platform APIs.

Changing platforms means changing APIs. It means a new set of APIs, which may need to be built from scratch, or which may be built for you, but exposing limited functionality than you used to have access to.

Your web UI is changing, and without updating your app, you risk showing two surfaces that look like different stores.

The details can be a little different, depending on what your replatform looks like (which platform you’re moving from/to), and how your previous app was built.

Let’s take a look at a few scenarios now.

No-Code Mobile App Built on a Platform-Native Builder

A no-code mobile app builder is a SaaS product purpose-built around one ecommerce platform’s APIs. You configure the app inside a vendor dashboard. The vendor’s product talks to your storefront. The data flow (catalog, cart, customer, checkout) runs through platform-specific connectors that only the vendor maintains.

When you change platforms, the connectors stop working. The vendor’s product surface ends at the platform’s API surface, so there’s no rebuild path with the same vendor on your new stack. Tapcart, the largest no-code app builder in the Shopify ecosystem, states the constraint directly on its own site: it “is only able to support businesses that run ecommerce operations on Shopify.”

This isn’t a con about Tapcart. It’s just the nature of the platform.

It’s the same with the hundreds of other tools in the Shopify App Store, as well as app builders tied to other platforms (e.g. you’re on Magento, built an app with a Magento app builder, and now picking up and moving to Shopify).

You’re looking at replacing your original app from scratch. Whole new vendor, whole new app.

Custom-Built Mobile App

Let’s say you’ve built custom. Fully custom, from the ground up. Maybe through an agency, maybe in-house.

You’re still, more than likely, using platform APIs to connect your app with your website.

In principle, you can rework the app to use the new platform’s APIs, and migrate your app along with your site.

But while it “can” be done, it adds a huge amount of complexity to your migration – which is already a drain on your resources, and a lot of things to juggle. Realistically, you’re rebuilding your app for the new platform.

If there’s a timeline you need to hit, get ready to extend it. If you need to keep within a budget, forget about it.

We’ve come across this many times. Rarely does the business have the engineering capacity to build a new mobile app, alongside their web migration. 

If you’re working with an agency, this means you and the agency need to be tightly aligned, or else there’ll be lag time between the website relaunch and the app relaunch. That may mean paying a premium to the agency to make your project their main priority.

All up, it’s just not something you want to add to the scope of shifting your entire commerce operation from one platform to another.

Replatforming Directions (and What Your Options Are)

The mobile app problem (and the solution) will look a little different depending on the direction of your migration.

Here are three common situations we run into, and what they mean for your app.

Off Shopify

You’re moving off Shopify, to BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, headless, custom, anywhere. You’ve probably got an app built with one of the app builders in the Shopify App Store (e.g. Tapcart).

Once you migrate, your app stops working. Simple as that. Almost every Shopify app vendor only works with Shopify. So you’re now faced with a custom build for the new platform, unless there’s a no-code tool that happens to support your new stack.

Off Shopify, the no-code mobile app ecosystem thins out fast. On BigCommerce there are a handful of options, none with the depth of the Shopify equivalents. On Adobe Commerce and SFCC, there’s effectively nothing at the no-code tier worth recommending. 

A custom build is the default once you leave Shopify, and that means building a whole new app alongside the web replatform.

Regular Shopify to Headless

This one’s a niche edge case that a lot of brands don’t consider until it bites them. You’re staying on Shopify, but you’re moving your frontend to Hydrogen or a custom headless build.

Technically, your app could still keep working. The Shopify backend is still there, and a Shopify-native app builder is still talking to the same Storefront and Admin APIs.

The problem isn’t that the app stops working. It’s that the app stops keeping up. The whole reason you went headless is that you wanted to build custom frontend experiences the standard Shopify storefront couldn’t support. 

Once you start shipping those experiences on the web, they don’t carry over to a templated, no-code app. The gap between your website and your app grows every month you keep building on the headless side – and eventually you might decide you need to rebuild the app anyway.

Non-Shopify to Shopify

This is the most common direction in enterprise replatforms right now. Magento to Shopify Plus. SFCC to Shopify Plus. Adobe Commerce to Shopify. Homegrown stacks to Shopify Plus.

The good news: there are more app options on the Shopify side than on any other platform. Pick a Shopify-native app builder and configure something for a standard Shopify store in a few weeks.

The catch: this is still a rebuild of your app. Your previous vendor isn’t coming with you, and even if you were on a custom build, the codebase needs to be reworked or replaced.

There’s a second catch if you’re moving to Shopify Plus with headless or a complex custom build. The edge case from the section above kicks in early. The standard Shopify-native app builders won’t be able to match what you’re doing on the web, and you’ll outgrow them faster than you’d like. That’s the same gap, just hit sooner.

So even on the most app-friendly platform in ecommerce, this is still a from-scratch app launch. The decision is which kind of app you launch.

Why Vendrux Is the Best Solution for Replatforming Your App

At Vendrux, we’re becoming specialists in this. That’s because our approach is naturally the best fit for a brand that’s replatforming, and having to rebuild or replatform an app at the same time.

Here’s why Vendrux is the best way to handle your mobile app during a replatform.

It’s Platform and Tech-Agnostic

Vendrux works with whatever your new platform looks like, whether you’re moving to Shopify or away from it. We support Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Magento, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, WooCommerce, and headless or fully custom commerce stacks. 

The app is built on the same tech stack as your website – not a separate build connected by APIs.

This is important. It means that when you migrate your website to a new platform (even to a fully custom, or headless stack), your app comes with it. We can build the app on your existing site, and have it switch to the new site once you launch, or build it on the new site that’s under development. Whichever works best for you.

(Building with Vendrux also means, if you happen to migrate again in the future, your app will come with you. No dealing with the same headaches again.)

The Timelines Line Up

One of the biggest issues with rebuilding your app as a custom build is the timeline.

A web migration might take three to six months. A custom app usually takes six months to a year.

Do the math – even if both kick off at the same time, and you’re able to build the mobile app independently, you’re looking at one of two scenarios:

• Pushing back the web migration until the app is ready
• A time between the new website launching and the app being ready, where customers can’t use your app anymore.

Neither are good outcomes. The app being unusable for any length of time is a disaster scenario, especially if you’d already built a decent sized user base.

Vendrux takes six to eight weeks to launch; potentially quicker. The time lines up perfectly with your migration, so you can launch with zero downtime for your app users.

Vendrux is Battle-Tested with Platform Migrations

We’ve done this numerous times. We’ve seen many brands going through migrations, we know the issues that come up, the edge cases that have to be dealt with.

And since we specialize in this kind of work (not exclusively – but it’s one of the things we’re best at), you know you’re getting a partner that’s working towards the same goals you are.

We did this same thing with buybuyBaby, for instance; helping them launch a new app during their replatform, resulting in no downtime for their app users.

“The incredible part was that we didn’t even have to think about the app during these transitions. When we finally reached out to check if our latest major redesign would affect the app, the response was immediate: ”You have nothing to worry about, everything will be fine.””
-Steven Kachtan, CIO of Dream On Me

It Works With All Your New Features

You’re replatforming for a reason. You want to build something new – you want to expand your web experience, launch new features your old platform wasn’t capable of, ship a better, more modern UI.

Whatever it is, Vendrux lets you reflect the same design, the same features in your mobile app. It’s not going to limit you to a basic template, or double the work to ship all these additions in a new channel.

It’s fully synced with your new site, already. Whatever you’re building on the new site, you’re also building in the app.

Final Thoughts

Replatforming is already one of the most demanding technical projects you can run. Adding a mobile app rebuild on top of it just makes it messier. 

It stretches engineering resources, breaks your timeline and budget, and risks real disruption for your app users.

Vendrux is the ideal way to replatform your mobile app at the same time. It takes the app project off your plate during the migration. The same app keeps running through the cutover, and your team only needs to focus on the web side of things.

If you’re planning a migration and wondering what to do with your app, that’s the conversation we’re built for. Book a strategy call and we’ll walk through your specific situation, and how we can help.