Vendrux

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  • How to Build a Multi-Storefront Ecommerce Mobile App

    How to Build a Multi-Storefront Ecommerce Mobile App

    Running a multi-storefront ecommerce business creates a specific problem the moment you decide to build a mobile app: how do you fit a dozen storefronts into a product the user taps once to open?

    This can be a major roadblock for global brands, brands with B2B and B2C stores, wholesale/retail, brands with buy/sell platforms, and a lot of other edge cases where you have multiple “stores” under one banner.

    A lot of the time, launching a mobile app for these brands either means launching separate apps with their own listings, reviews and update cycles, or a heavily complex development project, which could reach into the high six-figures in cost.

    Neither of these options are ideal. If your brand falls into this category, you’ll likely want to find a simpler way to build and maintain one, unified mobile app.

    Keep reading for the full picture.

    What Is a “Multi-Storefront” Ecommerce Business?

    Most businesses that land here fall into one of four patterns.

    The underlying app requirement is the same in all four: a single installed product has to serve several distinct commerce experiences without forcing shoppers to download separate apps.

    Multi-storefront apps let both audiences coexist without building two completely separate apps, as long as each audience is gated into its own flow after login.

    Multi-Region or Multi-Country Brands

    This is a common scenario. A brand sells in several countries, often with localized storefronts covering language, currency, shipping rules, and catalog differences. 

    We commonly hear from brands that run anywhere from three to fifteen regional storefronts. They might operate in the US, UK, Brazil, and multiple EU countries, with different sites, but the same brand across all.

    B2B and DTC or Wholesale and Retail Splits

    Brands might run a consumer-facing DTC storefront alongside a wholesale or B2B storefront on the same domain. The two experiences share a brand but differ on almost everything that matters commercially. Catalog, pricing, login-gated access, checkout, and sometimes the underlying platform all diverge.

    New Retail and Buy/Sell or Refurbished Storefronts

    Electronics retailers, collectibles platforms, sneaker marketplaces, and luxury resale brands frequently run a new-product catalog alongside a buy/sell, trade-in, or refurbished storefront. 

    Each side is under the same brand, but the commerce logic is genuinely different: new retail on one side with standard checkout and fulfillment, peer-to-peer or refurbished on the other with condition grading, seller payouts, escrow, and different trust and review flows.

    Multi-Brand Retail Groups

    Many enterprise brand portfolios exist with a number of individual brands under their umbrella.

    Think Unilever (as well as countless smaller portfolio companies).

    Most of the time, these groups will offer individual apps for each brand. But in some cases, the brands are combined and offered in the same web/app experience.

    Sub-Brands, Clubs, or Portfolio Experiences

    Less common, but the same mechanic supports it. Sports clubs, franchise networks, and brands that let users pick which “world” to enter on first launch all fit the multi-storefront pattern.

    The Edge Cases That Make Multi-Storefront Apps Hard

    On paper, a multi-storefront app sounds like a simple routing problem. After all, on web it’s easy – there’s no problem showing the right locale to the right user.

    In practice, the real-world shape of multi-storefront ecommerce creates edge cases that break most app infrastructure.

    Different Ecommerce Platforms Per Region

    International brands grow by acquisition, partnership, and regional hand-off, which often means the US site often runs on Shopify while the Latin American sites run on VTEX, the European sites on Magento, and a Middle Eastern site on Salla or a custom build. 

    Most app builders assume a single backend platform and cannot route one app to several different ones. Custom native teams can technically handle it, but every new platform is a new integration project. You’re turning a $50-$100K project into one that could touch seven figures.

    Separate Authentication and Checkout Flows Per Storefront

    Each regional or brand storefront often has its own account system, checkout rails, and loyalty platform. A shopper who signs up in the US does not automatically have an account in Germany. The app has to respect each storefront’s auth logic instead of flattening everything into one global user table.

    Language, Currency, Catalog, and Tax Logic

    These are not decorative differences. A shopper seeing US dollars when their card charges in euros is a returns event waiting to happen. Every region has its own SKUs, VAT treatment, shipping windows, and locally relevant promotions. The app cannot paper over any of that.

    Platform-Specific Payment Rails

    Pix in Brazil, iDEAL in the Netherlands, Klarna in the Nordics, Cash on Delivery across the Middle East. Each storefront needs to pass through the payment methods shoppers in that region actually use. 

    If the app bypasses the website’s checkout, those methods have to be re-integrated from scratch.

    Why the Default Has Been “One App Per Storefront”

    The combination above is exactly why most mobile app platforms default to the simplest possible architecture: one app, one backend, one storefront. Multiply by regions and you get a portfolio of apps. That architecture is easier for the vendor, worse for the brand, and worse for the shopper.

    The Multi-App Problem

    Separating different languages, catalogs, logic etc is easy enough if you say “we’re going to launch different apps for each location” (or for B2B & B2C, wholesale & retail).

    Sometimes this is the best approach. In a lot of cases, it’s not (particularly global brands).

    Different apps means:

    • Different app store listings
    • Different reviews
    • Different rankings and ASO signals
    • Different update cycles

    It’s just so much more to juggle. One app for all your properties streamlines it tremendously.

    How Vendrux Builds You a Multi-Storefront Mobile App

    There’s a perfect solution for global brands, and other multi-faceted ecommerce brands that need to integrate multiple “stores” in one mobile app.

    Vendrux builds a single app that can run multiple configurations. Each configuration is the complete definition of one storefront experience, covering navigation, styling, URLs, auth, push setup, and native behaviors. One app can hold as many configurations as the business needs.

    How It Works (In Practice)

    The UX most brands use is straightforward. On first launch, the app shows a menu – typically flags with country names, or logos with brand names – and the shopper picks theirs. 

    The app loads that configuration, and everything from that point forward is the storefront they selected. 

    If the shopper wants to switch later (traveling, expats, browsing another market), they change their selection from the settings screen.

    Under each configuration, the app points at whatever website powers that storefront. That could be Shopify in the US. VTEX in Brazil. Magento in Germany. BigCommerce in Australia. The app doesn’t care what platform powers each storefront.

    The same thing runs true if you want different brand stores in one app, or a B2B and B2C retail, or a traditional storefront and a P2P marketplace.

    You can ship this with:

    • One iOS app and one Android app
    • One App Store listing and one Play Store listing
    • One native binary to maintain across platform updates and OS releases
    • One dashboard to manage every storefront’s configuration
    • One set of native features (push, deep linking, native checkout upgrades) applied across all configurations

    Each storefront remains independent (and managed via the web, as you currently do it), with their own:

    • Content, catalog, pricing, and checkout
    • Language, currency, tax, and payment methods
    • User accounts and order history
    • Push notification segmentation
    • Analytics, attribution, and reporting

    Most Vendrux customers with multi-storefront setups ship a single multi-configuration app. It is the recommended default because it compounds review signal, ranks under one App Store listing per region, and gives marketing teams one asset to promote instead of a portfolio.

    We’ve done this for multiple customers, the most notable being Bestseller. This international, family-owned fashion company has over 20 brands, with most operating in a number of different markets (their products are sold in over 90 countries altogether).

    For several of their brands, we helped them launch apps that combine each of their brands’ locations inside of one app.

    No “Jack & Jones US”, “Jack & Jones Germany”, “Jack & Jones Denmark” etc – just one Jack & Jones app, that customers in all of their supported markets can use and switch to their own region.

    “Through history we’ve tried doing what Vendrux does. We couldn’t find another company that could offer the same features at the same price point, same time to market, and make it as easy as Vendrux could.”
    — Svend Hansen, Product Owner at Bestseller

    It’s just one example of how Vendrux can easily accommodate some of the most difficult ecommerce configurations, and simplify the process of launching and maintaining mobile apps.

    Vendrux’s Multi-Storefront Solution vs the Alternatives

    The two broad alternatives to launch a mobile app would be to custom-build apps from scratch, or use a DIY no-code app builder.

    Generally speaking, neither are ideal. Let’s break it down:

    Custom Native Development

    Custom native development can handle multi-storefront apps. By definition, if you’re coding apps from scratch, there’s nothing you can’t do.

    But the problem is, the complexity of this kind of project is brutal.

    Custom “from scratch” builds are long and costly and difficult to maintain in the first place. You’re usually looking at $100K+, just for the first build (not taking into account the ongoing maintenance cost).

    Now, by integrating multiple storefronts, potentially with different platforms, different APIs, auth flows, payment gateways, backend logic, you’re adding multiples to the complexity (and cost).

    In the best case, we typically don’t recommend building from scratch if you’re an ecommerce store. It’s even worse with edge cases like these. You’re turning what could be a high-ROI project into an operational nightmare.

    No-Code App Builders

    The other alternative is to use a no-code tool.

    These tools are a great way to build an app, for certain types of stores. But they’ll likely struggle with more complicated setups.

    Most, on their higher plans, support currency localization. But that usually doesn’t cover brands with completely different storefronts for each region.

    And almost certainly not brands with starkly different B2B and B2C channels, or P2P selling.

    You’re often going to end up with separate apps, which as we’ve established, generally isn’t ideal.

    Also, these tools are explicitly tied to the platforms they’ve built API integrations with (usually only Shopify).

    If you’re a brand with a US store on Shopify, but selling on PrestaShop in the EU and Salesforce Commerce Cloud in Australia, there’s basically no way you’ll be able to ship one unified app with these no-code app builders.

    Running multi-region or multi-brand ecommerce?

    Your team already maintains every storefront in the format that works best for each region: different platforms, different currencies, different checkouts. You don’t need to rebuild that architecture for the app.

    Vendrux extends every one of your storefronts into one native app, with one App Store listing and one dashboard to manage it all. Around 30 days from kickoff to live in both stores.

    Book a Free Strategy Call

    How to Turn Your Multi-Config Ecommerce Store Into a Unified Mobile App

    Vendrux is the easiest, most effective way for ecommerce stores with multiple configurations to launch a mobile app that features all of their configs under one banner.

    The operational cost, the marketing cost, and the shopper experience are all so much better compared to the portfolio-of-apps model.

    And you get this one, unified app, without the massive complexity of a custom app built from scratch.

    If you do need separate apps, we can of course accommodate that too. The key point is that we work for you – you don’t adapt your store, your tech stack, and your desired output to fit our platform.

    If you want a closer look at what’s possible, get in touch – get a free preview and we’ll show you an interactive demo, and walk you through how we’ll turn your multi-config setup into the perfect mobile app.

  • Do Mobile Apps Boost Conversion Rates for Ecommerce Stores?

    Do Mobile Apps Boost Conversion Rates for Ecommerce Stores?

    The average conversion rate for mobile ecommerce sites is just 1.8%. Various studies (such as Vendrux’s Ecommerce Mobile App Benchmark Report) show average mobile app conversion rates can be up to 7x higher.

    So the answer is pretty clear, right? If you’re struggling with low conversion rates on your site, you should launch a mobile app.

    It’s not quite that straightforward. This is actually a common mistake – and if you’re launching an app for this reason, it may lead you down the wrong path.

    We’ve seen the impact of countless apps for countless brands, in the 10+ years we’ve been building mobile apps for online brands. So we’ve got a lot of experience seeing which metrics shift, and for what reasons, when a brand launches a mobile app.

    Keep reading for all you need to know, and the real answer to the mobile conversion rate problem.

    The Short Answer: Yes, But Not for the Reason You Think

    Mobile apps do convert better than the mobile web. The data is undeniable.

    Our Benchmark Report finds up to 7x higher conversion rates from app users, on average. That’s a huge difference.

    But, like any kind of data, looking at it on its own, without context, is misleading.

    The conversion rate gap exists primarily because of who’s shopping in each channel, not because apps inherently convert that much better.

    A mobile website gets traffic from all kinds of sources, with wildly different levels of intent.

    There’s someone coming back to reorder their staples, alongside someone who clicked a link from a Facebook ad, someone who made a Google search and opened five different brands’ sites, and someone who clicked a link from an email.

    In an app, each visitor comes with a higher level of intent. They know you, they downloaded your app. They’re built to convert at a higher rate, no matter the surface.

    Is There a Real Conversion Boost from the App Itself?

    Strip out the audience effect for a second. Same customer, same intent, same product – does the app format actually convert better than mobile web?

    Yes. Just not by as much as the headline stats suggest.

    A few things genuinely drive higher conversion rates in an app:

    • Fewer distractions. No browser tabs competing for attention, no cross-site retargeting, no banner ads, no auto-playing videos from other tabs.
    • Persistent login and saved payment details. It’s generally smoother to check out in an app, and the user is likely already logged in, reducing the number of steps required to buy.
    • Faster load times and smoother navigation. No reloads, no waiting for pages to render. The session stays warm.
    • Stable cart state. Carts don’t get lost when the browser crashes or the user multitasks.
    • No price-comparison friction. A shopper in your app isn’t toggling between five competitor tabs.

    Add it all up, and yes, the same shopper will probably convert at a higher rate inside your app than on your mobile site.

    It’s just not as high as the data suggests.

    The bulk of the buying experience really isn’t that much different. And there’s not a lot you can do in an app that you can’t do on the mobile web (such as one-click payment options like Apple Pay and Shop Pay) in the first place.

    Abandoned cart recovery in apps

    Apps also give you a free, direct channel to recover would-be lost sales. A push notification an hour after a shopper bails on checkout (or the next morning) can pull them back in to complete the purchase. Functionally, that’s a conversion lift on the same traffic, just measured a few hours later than the original session – and it’s one of the highest-ROI features an app unlocks.

    Why Conversion Rate Is the Wrong KPI for Your App

    Conversion rate is fundamentally an efficiency metric. It measures how well you turn earned and paid traffic into revenue. It tells you whether you’re squeezing enough value out of every visit.

    That makes sense for your website. Website traffic is scarce and expensive. You’re paying for clicks, fighting for SEO rankings, and competing for organic visibility against every other brand in your category. Every visit has to count.

    Apps don’t operate under the same economics.

    App Sessions Aren’t a Scarce Resource

    Once a customer installs your app, opening it costs you nothing.

    You’re not paying per visit. You’re not bidding against competitors for their attention. A push notification costs zero dollars and lands directly on the lock screen. A returning customer who opens the app because they saw your icon on their home screen also costs zero dollars.

    When sessions are abundant and free, “what percentage of sessions convert?” stops being the metric that matters. The constraint that makes conversion rate most meaningful on your website (scarce, expensive traffic) doesn’t apply.

    Habitual Engagement Beats Per-Session Conversion

    The job of an app isn’t to maximize the conversion rate of every individual session. It’s to drive repeat opens and habitual engagement.

    A customer who opens your app eight times this week and buys once is more valuable than a customer who opens it once and buys once at a higher conversion rate. 

    The first customer is in your orbit. The second one might forget about you next month.

    For most ecommerce brands, frequency multiplied by AOV beats raw conversion rate every time.

    So Why Launch an App? Retention, AOV, and Repeat Engagement

    If conversion rate isn’t the reason to build an app, what is? Is there any difference?

    Apps deliver the biggest uptick in the metrics that drive long-term revenue: retention, average order value, and engagement frequency. This is where the format genuinely changes the customer experience, and it’s where you’ll see the biggest delta if you launch one.

    Retention and Repeat Purchase Rate

    App users come back more often than web users. The mechanics are simple – your app icon sits on their home screen next to Amazon and Instagram, push notifications reach them directly, and re-entry takes one tap instead of typing your URL or digging through email.

    A customer who shops with you once every three months on the web could be a customer who shops multiple times a month in the app. That shift compounds into significantly higher retention rates and customer LTV.

    Average Order Value

    App sessions run deeper than web sessions. Users browse longer, stack more items into carts, and use features like wishlists and recommendations more often. That depth shows up in average order value.

    It’s not unusual to see $70 mobile web AOV climb to $100+ in the app, with the same product catalog and pricing, just because the app keeps the shopper engaged for longer.

    Engagement Frequency

    Mobile web sessions are short. Three minutes is typical. App sessions routinely run double that.

    More time in your store equals more product exposure, more discovery, and more repeat behavior. Over a 12-month window, that engagement gap is what produces the LTV difference between an app user and a web-only user.

    Best KPIs to Track in Your App

    So if conversion rate isn’t the right KPI for your app, what is? 

    These are the core KPIs that track how your app is performing:

    • Daily and monthly active users (DAU, MAU)
    • Sessions per user per week
    • Repeat purchase rate (app users vs web-only users)
    • 30, 60, and 90-day retention curves
    • LTV by channel over a 12-month window
    • Push engagement – opt-in rate, open rate, attributed revenue

    Monitor and optimize those numbers. Stop benchmarking your app against your mobile web conversion rate. It’s not the same job.

    The Real Fix for the Mobile Conversion Rate Problem

    Now let’s address the elephant in the room. If your mobile web conversion rate is sitting at 1.8% and you want to fix it, an app isn’t the answer.

    The fix is improving your mobile web experience. Not shifting your attention to a different surface.

    This is where most operators get stuck. They see the conversion gap, assume the app is the magic fix, and skip past the actual problem – which is that their mobile site is underperforming.

    Mobile Web Has Never Been More Capable

    The tools available to build a high-converting mobile site today are dramatically better than they were even three years ago.

    If you’re on Shopify, you have access to themes, apps, and CRO tools that can move your mobile conversion rate substantially. Personalization, dynamic content, on-page recommendations, AI-assisted product discovery, smart search, instant checkout – all of it is available, much of it for cheap or free.

    AI specifically has changed the game. Generative product descriptions, dynamic merchandising, image-based search, real-time chat agents, predictive personalization. Capabilities that required enterprise budgets two years ago now ship in $50/month apps (or even Shopify’s core features).

    If your mobile site is converting at 1.8%, there’s almost certainly significant low-hanging fruit on the table.

    The Math of a 1.8% to 2.5% Lift

    Even a small uptick in conversion rate on your website will likely drive a massive impact for your overall business economics.

    Say you’re driving 250,000 monthly mobile web visitors. Your mobile conversion rate is the industry average of 1.8%. Your AOV is $100.

    • 250,000 visitors x 1.8% CVR = 4,500 orders
    • 4,500 orders x $100 AOV = $450,000/month in mobile web revenue

    Now run a CRO push and lift that conversion rate to 2.5%. Same traffic, same AOV, same product catalog.

    • 250,000 visitors x 2.5% CVR = 6,250 orders
    • 6,250 orders x $100 AOV = $625,000/month

    That’s an extra $175,000/month, or roughly $2.1M/year, from a single round of CRO improvements on your mobile site. No new traffic acquired, no new channel launched, no platform migration.

    And there’s nothing aspirational about 2.5%. Plenty of well-optimized mobile sites convert at 3% or higher. The ceiling is well above where most brands sit.

    Fix your website first. The math is overwhelmingly in your favor.

    The Bonus – Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rate, Improve Your App

    A lot of operators want to ship a separate app, a completely different surface, as a way to “fix” conversion rates.

    Realistically this is just fixing conversion rates for the top ~10% of your customers, and ignoring the rest – and now giving you a new channel to manage.

    This is why launching an app with Vendrux is so smart. 

    With Vendrux, your app reflects your web experience. The checkout flow, design, UX, and everything else you build on the web carries over to the app.

    When you do CRO work to improve your mobile website, that carries over to your app as well. You’re not treating the app and website as completely separate storefronts. When you ship improvements, you’re shipping them across every surface your customers shop on.

    This makes your work compounding, rather than fragmented.

    Make your investments go further.

    If you’re shipping CRO upgrades to your mobile site – faster checkout, better recommendations, smarter search, sharper merchandising – you’ve already done the hardest work. The question is whether those wins stop at your website or carry over to your most loyal customers in a dedicated app.

    Vendrux extends your existing site into a fully native mobile app, synced with your website in real time. Every CRO improvement you ship shows up in both surfaces – one team, one roadmap, two channels.

    Get a Free App Preview

    The Final Word on Mobile Apps & Conversion Rates

    Mobile apps don’t fix conversion rates. They’re the wrong tool for that job.

    What apps do is deepen the relationship with the customers who already love you – the top 10-15% who drive a disproportionate share of your revenue. That’s where it’s worth launching an app – to boost retention, AOV, repeat engagement, and LTV.

    If you want to lift your mobile conversion rate, fix your mobile website. That’s where most of your traffic lands, and modern tools mean that just about anything you can build in an  app, you can realistically build on the web as well.

    Don’t look at the problem backwards, like many operators. Build a perfectly optimized mobile website, and turn it into a mobile app that extends your improvements to a new, high-retention, high-engagement mobile channel.

  • Ecommerce Mobile App Challenges, Edge Cases and Niche Roadblocks for Enterprise and Legacy Brands

    Ecommerce Mobile App Challenges, Edge Cases and Niche Roadblocks for Enterprise and Legacy Brands

    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.
    Warby Parker has prescriptions as part of their checkout flow. Just another thing that adds complexity in an app

    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.

    Running a custom checkout, multi-region, or ERP-backed stack?
    See what your site will look like as a native app:

    Get a Free App Preview

    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.

    REI Co-op‘s “buy online, pick up in-store” feature

    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.

    The Pharmazone app – a great example of an app Vendrux built for a difficult industry

    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.

    MASC’s shoppable videos – something that doesn’t carry over with most app builders.

    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.

    Some of the mobile apps built for Vendrux users

    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.

    Launch an app with no compromises.

    Custom checkout, B2B account complexity, multi-region storefronts, ERP-tied catalogs, regulated workflows, marketplace logic. Most enterprise stacks tick at least three of these boxes, and each one breaks the standard ways of building a mobile app.

    Vendrux delivers a native app powered by your existing tech stack, so every feature carries over without a rebuild, no parallel codebase to maintain, and no compliance issues.

    Book a Free Consultation

    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.

  • Mobile Apps for the Other 80%: How to Launch an App for a Non-Shopify Store

    Mobile Apps for the Other 80%: How to Launch an App for a Non-Shopify Store

    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.

    Archetype Platforms Example brands Why they’re here
    B2B distributors and manufacturers Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Shopware, Salesforce B2B Commerce, SAP, ERP-integrated custom REDARC (Adobe), Bio-Rad (BigCommerce), Prime-Line (BigCommerce) Hierarchies, contracted pricing, sales rep accounts, quote-to-order, customer-specific catalogs
    Enterprise and legacy stacks Adobe Commerce (Magento), Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopware HanesBrands, Catbird, Coca-Cola En Tu Hogar (Adobe)
    PUMA, YETI, Sonos, Fisher & Paykel (SFCC)
    STABILO, ARMEDANGELS, MissPompadour (Shopware)    		 Pre-date Shopify Plus. Years of investment in the existing stack. Want the app to extend it, not replace it
    Audience-first publishers WooCommerce All Blacks rugby team shop, Tiny Wood Stove Store is downstream of content. Built audience first, added the cart later. WordPress plugin ecosystem is the moat
    Custom and headless stacks commercetools, MedusaJS, BigCommerce Catalyst, custom builds L.L.Bean, PetSmart, Breville, FREITAG (commercetools), Tekla Fabrics (MedusaJS) Engineering depth in-house. Want commerce as APIs, not a hosted theme

    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.

    On Magento, Shopware, BigCommerce, or a custom stack?

    You don’t need a six-figure from-scratch build to ship a real custom mobile app. Vendrux builds your iOS and Android apps on top of the storefront you already run, with native push, native checkout, and the app-only experiences your customers actually want.

    Around 30 days from kickoff to live in both stores. And if your platform changes a year from now, the app comes with you.

    Book a Free Strategy Call

    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.

  • Magento Mobile App Development: The Complete 2026 Guide for Magento & Adobe Commerce Brands

    Magento Mobile App Development: The Complete 2026 Guide for Magento & Adobe Commerce Brands

    Mobile apps should be on the radar for any serious Magento or Adobe Commerce brand. The business case is clear: app users come back more often, spend more per order, and cost less to reach than customers who only visit your mobile website.

    The biggest question isn’t whether to build an app. It’s how.

    This article is the complete guide to Magento mobile app development for brand operators: a practical walkthrough of the different ways to get there, the challenges you’re likely to face, and the solution that’s most efficient for you.

    At Vendrux we’ve been working with online brands for over 12 years, including many brands with custom, Magento-powered websites. That first-hand experience working with brands like yours is what we’ve used to shape this article and provide a real, zero-fluff breakdown of the best way for you to launch your mobile app.

    Why Your Magento Brand Needs a Mobile App

    Magento and Adobe Commerce brands tend to be larger, more retention-driven, and more operationally complex than the average Shopify SMB. 

    That’s exactly the profile where mobile apps have the biggest impact; the kind of brands that, without question, need to have an app.

    And while everything online is talking about the death of non-Shopify ecommerce, the Magento (and Adobe Commerce) ecosystem isn’t going anywhere. It’s still one of the 5 most popular ecommerce platforms, and tends to command a higher market share among mid-market and enterprise brands.

    Here are a few key reasons why your brand should have its own app:

    A home screen icon keeps your brand in front of your best customers

    When you have an app, your brand’s logo lives on your customer’s home screen, sitting next to Amazon, Instagram, and TikTok. 

    That provides constant brand awareness, plus organic return visits, not dependent on a social media algorithm or ad spend.

    App shoppers spend more per visit and per year

    App users consistently have higher AOV and higher annual spend than mobile web shoppers. Some of that is self-selection (your most engaged customers install). The rest is experience: a native experience drives stronger and longer engagement, leading to more visits and more sales.

    Push notifications reach customers directly, for free

    Native push notifications are the most powerful marketing channel in ecommerce, on a message for message basis. They reach your customers on their lock screen, with zero per-send cost, and almost guaranteed visibility. 

    Push is the only channel you have that combines high reach, direct-to-device delivery, and effectively no marginal cost.

    Behavioral push recovers revenue mobile web can’t touch

    Abandoned cart, back-in-stock, and price-drop notifications reach customers the moment it matters and convert at rates email can’t match. With a meaningful install base, the push notifications, on their own, become one of your best revenue channels.

    For more on the strategic case for mobile apps for Magento brands, see our guide to why your Magento store needs a mobile app.

    What to Know When Building a Mobile App for Your Magento Store

    Many Magento brands, despite years building and perfecting a bespoke web experience, have little experience in the domain of mobile apps.

    That means there’s a lot to learn – from the different kinds of mobile app you can build, to the cost and time expectations, plus the unique challenges for Magento/Adobe Commerce brands.

    Here’s a primer on what you need to know.

    The Different Ways to Build a Magento Mobile App

    Not all mobile apps are the same.

    Like you can build a simple website with a simple template-based CMS, or a complex self-hosted PHP site, there are varying scopes when it comes to mobile apps.

    There are:

    • Custom native apps: apps built from scratch in mobile-native frameworks, like Swift, Kotlin, React Native and Flutter. The app integrates with Magento via REST or GraphQL APIs, and offers optimal performance, but a high level of management required.
    • Template-based apps: SaaS tools and Magento extensions that pull your product data into pre-built mobile app templates. Simple, very affordable, but inflexible.
    • Progressive Web Apps: Adobe’s PWA Studio lets you put together a PWA, which is not a “real” mobile app, but a more powerful version of your site, that offers limited app-like functionality.
    • Hybrid mobile apps: an approach to mobile apps that’s growing in popularity, letting you build apps that utilize and build on top of your existing web code; instead of starting over from scratch with a new codebase.

    The kind of app you build is probably the most important decision you can make in the procurement process, as it influences the cost, timeline, functionality and user experience of the end product.

    What it Costs to Build a Magento Mobile App

    Building a mobile app for a Magento store can cost anywhere from $50 to $500K. 

    On the low end, some general-purpose webview app builders can cost as little as $50 to go live with your app (though it’ll essentially just be a website in a box; likely not publish-worthy).

    Template-based app builders built for Magento, such as MageComp, Webkul and MageMob, cost anywhere from $200-$500 (typically per-year).

    On the high end, you’re looking at a wide range – potentially $150,000-$500,000, for a custom native app built from scratch by an agency/dev team. (that’s for v1 – not including the ongoing operating cost).

    With Vendrux, you’re looking at a cost in the low-four figures per month (with little to no incremental cost on top of that, such as labor cost or opportunity cost).

    For the full breakdown, see our deep dive on the cost to turn a Magento store into an app.

    The Challenges No One Warns You About

    There are some obvious challenges when it comes to building a mobile app.

    Your team doesn’t know how to build one.

    App developers are expensive.

    No-code tools are too rigid.

    You can get past these challenges. But the struggle of finding the right developer or stringing together the budget for a custom app are actually not the biggest things to worry about.

    The biggest roadblocks are more about what happens after you launch.

    1: The overhead of a separate platform

    A standalone app is a second product to maintain, with its own roadmap, its own QA cycle, its own release process.

    This is a major operational drag (not to mention the recurring maintenance cost). You’re essentially giving yourself a second storefront to take care of.

    2: Duplicate work

    Whether you build a $500K custom app, or a $200 template app, with two separate platforms, you’re left doing the same work twice.

    Merchandising, promos, seasonal changes. The same updates you do on your website need to be done again on your mobile app, creating massive duplication of effort.

    3: Inconsistencies between website and app

    This is something we see incredibly often.

    Your website moves faster than your app; new features, updates, tests, small changes. A gap emerges between your website and app, which you’re constantly scrambling to close.

    Sometimes it’s not even possible to close the gap. Some of your web features or integrations from your site might not work in your app. You can risk ending up with an app that provides a worse experience than your website – which is the opposite of what it’s supposed to be.

    What Your Magento Mobile App Needs to Add to Your Website

    Here’s something most people overlook: your Adobe Commerce or Magento store already does almost everything your app needs to do.

    Think about it.

    • Your storefront has the catalog, product pages, search, cart, and checkout.
    • It processes payments, including Apple Pay and Google Pay support.
    • It runs your loyalty program, reviews, subscriptions, personalization, B2B logic, and merchandising rules.
    • It likely integrates with a number of powerful marketing tools. 
    • For Adobe Commerce B2B stores, it handles company accounts, quote workflows, contracted pricing, and custom catalogs.

    That took a lot of years and a lot of money to assemble. It works on your mobile. There’s not a lot that’s fundamentally different about how someone buys on your app vs your website.

    You’re launching an app to provide an improved mobile UX. But the differences are not that extreme.

    You’re looking for a native layer on top of your existing storefront, not a completely new, completely reimagined UX. Most Magento brands need:

    • A home screen icon so customers can reach you without typing a URL or digging around in their bookmarks.
    • App Store and Google Play listings, which make it easy for your customers to find and download your app.
    • Native push notifications.
    • Small native UI improvements: native tab bar, hamburger menu, small touches that make it feel mobile-native.
    • App-exclusive experiences, like exclusive pricing or products or other perks for app users, perhaps a special homepage for your app.

    The app should feel special. But the features you need to make it feel that way aren’t.

    How Vendrux Builds Mobile Apps for Magento and Adobe Commerce Brands

    Vendrux is a custom development partner that turns your existing Magento or Adobe Commerce storefront into a native iOS and Android app.

    You get a custom app, built specifically for your brand, distributed on the App Store and Google Play, with native push notifications, deep linking, native UI, and everything you need for an engaging UX.

    The difference? Vendrux’s approach builds on top of your website, not alongside it.

    • You’re not creating a brand new, mobile-native codebase that needs a dedicated team to manage.
    • You’re not importing product data into a basic, rigid and inflexible template.

    You manage the content and design through your Magento/Adobe Commerce backend, with the same team you currently have. 

    Why Vendrux Is the Best Way to Build a Mobile App for Magento and Adobe Commerce

    Here’s what you get with Vendrux, and why brands like yours choose us over the alternatives: 

    • Built on your existing tech stack. Every feature, extension, and design update on your Magento or Adobe Commerce site works in your app. No rebuilding what already works.
    • Done-for-you service. Vendrux’s team handles everything to do with the app, from build to testing to ongoing maintenance.
    • Works with Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce, and Adobe Commerce B2B. Including Hyvä builds, Mage-OS open source forks, headless builds. Whatever flavor of Magento your storefront is on, the app inherits it.
    • Native & app-only features. Vendrux’s team helps you make your app a unique experience with virtually no limitations.
    • Roughly 30 days to launch. It generally takes around 6-8 weeks to go live, significantly faster than a custom build (which is usually 6 months minimum).
    • Predictable, flat-fee pricing. The cost is much more affordable than building a new app from scratch, with no revenue share or surprise bills.

    Vendrux has built over 2,000 apps since 2013, specializing in custom, bespoke ecommerce brands like those that typically run on Magento.

    With no parallel codebase, and none of the limitations of no-code app builders, it’s just a better way to launch a custom app.

    How Vendrux Compares to Custom Development and Template-Based Builders

    Compared to API-driven custom development, Vendrux delivers the same native app outcome at a fraction of the cost and complexity. 

    No parallel engineering team to staff. Faster time-to-launch by months. 

    Vendrux’s architecture, which lets you use your website as the source of all your content, product details and design, means your storefront and your app stay in sync, automatically.

    Compared to template-based app builders, Vendrux delivers a real custom app rather than a basic template. Your storefront, your design, your integrations, your B2B logic, all carry over to the app. Compliance and maintenance live with our team, not yours.

    This is also where our track record on enterprise-grade ecommerce stacks matters. Magento and Adobe Commerce brands tend to run heavily customized storefronts. The architectural advantage of building on top of that storefront, instead of trying to rebuild it elsewhere, compounds with every customization.

    Ready to ship a real Magento mobile app?

    You’ve already built an Adobe Commerce or Magento store that works: catalog, checkout, payments, B2B logic, and every integration in your stack. Rebuilding all of that in a second environment usually isn’t where the effort belongs.

    Vendrux takes your existing storefront and ships it as native iOS and Android apps, handles the full build and submissions, and keeps the app in sync with your site automatically. Launch in around 30 days, on a flat subscription with no revenue share.

    Book a Free Strategy Call

    Tadashi Shoji: Custom Magento-Powered App, with a Lean Dev Team

    Luxury fashion brand Tadashi Shoji partnered with Vendrux to launch their app.

    As a product-first company, they operate with a lean IT team. They don’t have mobile app developers on the team, and the prospect of building a custom native app appeared prohibitively expensive and resource-intensive when they explored it.

    “At first, we explored the viability of building our own native apps from the ground up. And while that was achievable, managing them effectively moving forward would not have been feasible due to the disconnected nature of such an approach.”
    — David Chamberlin, Lead Developer, Tadashi Shoji

    The solution: Vendrux worked with them to launch a custom app, powered by the same tech stack they already used.

    The result was an app that fit their brand perfectly, and delivered results with minimal upkeep – contributing 18% of their total online revenue, and 10x higher revenue per user, 8.3x higher conversion rate and 3.8x session frequency compared to their mobile website.

    Getting Started: Building Your Magento Mobile App

    An ecommerce brand built on Magento/Adobe Commerce will almost certainly benefit from the brand and engagement benefits of a native app.

    Vendrux is the best way to get there. You don’t need to spend six figures on a custom build that may or may not work as you want it to, and you don’t need to be hampered by the limitations of a no-code platform.

    If you’re ready to explore your options, book a free strategy call, and we’ll walk you through a free preview of your Magento or Adobe Commerce store as a native app, answer your questions, and help you scope what the project would look like for your brand.

  • BigCommerce vs Shopify for Mobile Apps: Which Platform Makes It Easier to Launch and Maintain an App?

    BigCommerce vs Shopify for Mobile Apps: Which Platform Makes It Easier to Launch and Maintain an App?

    If you’re serious about launching a mobile app, are you better off on Shopify or BigCommerce?

    The answer is closer to a tie than the platform marketing makes it seem. Shopify has the larger ecosystem of mobile app builders, the cleaner API documentation, and the baked-in architecture (Storefront API plus Checkout Kit) that makes mobile apps fairly accessible (assuming you have access to the right developers).

    BigCommerce has more flexible APIs, a fully open checkout you can customize end to end, and deeper headless functionality for brands that want to build something more custom. 

    Each platform has the ability to be a solid backend for a mobile app. But realistically, neither one has such a strong advantage that it alone should drive your decision to replatform your website.

    Keep reading and I’ll break down how each ecommerce platform works as the backend for your mobile app, the mobile app ecosystem for each one, whether there’s any reason to switch platforms to cater to your mobile app, and how Vendrux makes the Shopify vs BigCommerce decision irrelevant.

    Why More BigCommerce and Shopify Brands Are Launching Mobile Apps

    Global mobile commerce sales reached roughly $2.07 trillion in 2024, accounting for 57% of all ecommerce transactions. For most brands, whether on Shopify or BigCommerce or any other platform, mobile is the majority of the funnel and the bulk of repeat purchases.

    Every brand has a fast and responsive mobile website. But a mobile app is less common, yet so much more powerful as a mobile-first surface.

    Apps drive the highest-value behavior: more repeat purchases, larger orders, and give you push notifications – messages that land on your customer’s lock screen, instantly, with near-guaranteed visibility.

    In a time where profit margins, retention and repeat customer engagement are more important than ever, a mobile app, too, becomes a crucial brand asset, whether you’re a DTC brand on Shopify or a B2B BigCommerce store.

    BigCommerce vs Shopify for Mobile Apps at a Glance

    Neither BigCommerce or Shopify has their own “mobile app builder” – both are primarily web platforms.

    But both platforms have their own infrastructure for businesses looking to extend their store to a dedicated mobile app: dedicated mobile app documentation, headless frameworks (Hydrogen on Shopify, Catalyst on BigCommerce), and a vendor ecosystem of mobile app builders that handle the build for merchants who don’t want to write the app from scratch.

    The platforms are closer than the marketing makes them sound, but each has a real edge. Shopify wins on ecosystem breadth and out-of-the-box tooling for self-serve app builders. BigCommerce wins on API flexibility and headless freedom, including the ability to fully customize your checkout.

    Aspect Shopify BigCommerce
    Recommended architecture Storefront API + Checkout Kit REST + GraphQL Storefront API
    Checkout Locked to Shopify (rendered via Checkout Kit) Fully customizable
    Headless framework Hydrogen Catalyst (Next.js) + MakeSwift
    Mobile app builders 96 in the App Store category Minimal (
    Transaction fees 0.5%–2% on third-party gateways None
    Vendrux support Full – including Plus and Hydrogen Full – including B2B Edition and Catalyst

    The table doesn’t tell the entire picture, of course. But it’s a helpful foundation for looking at the differences between how each platform powers your mobile app.

    How BigCommerce and Shopify APIs Power a Mobile App

    A mobile app needs to fetch products, manage carts, take orders, and read customer data from your store. 

    Both Shopify and BigCommerce expose APIs to do that, but they’re shaped differently and aimed at slightly different builds. Here’s what you need to know about each, before deciding whether going custom is even the right call.

    Shopify’s APIs for Mobile Apps

    Shopify exposes three things that matter for a mobile app: the Storefront API, the Admin API, and Checkout Kit.

    • The Storefront API is GraphQL and customer-facing. It’s how the app pulls products, search results, and cart state. 
    • The Admin API handles back-office operations like order creation and customer management. 
    • Checkout Kit is the newer piece, and it’s the one most brands miss in their first reading: it renders Shopify’s actual checkout natively inside your iOS, Android, or React Native app. You pass a checkoutUrl and Checkout Kit handles the rest, including Shop Pay, Apple Pay, and your store’s branding.

    Shopify’s official mobile commerce documentation recommends Storefront API plus Checkout Kit as the canonical path for mobile apps, which means checkout itself runs through Shopify’s infrastructure rather than something you fully control in your app. 

    This is fine for the vast majority of brands. It’s a real constraint for anyone who needs a fully custom checkout flow.

    The older Mobile Buy SDK and JavaScript Buy SDK are out of the picture. Shopify deprecated the JS Buy SDK in January 2025 and discontinued support in March 2025. If you read older guides recommending the Mobile Buy SDK, ignore them. The current path is Storefront API plus Checkout Kit.

    For deeper coverage of the Shopify side, see Vendrux’s guide to the Shopify API for mobile apps, which includes a breakdown of the pros and cons of the API-driven approach itself.

    BigCommerce’s APIs for Mobile Apps

    BigCommerce exposes both REST and GraphQL Storefront APIs, an Admin REST API for back-office operations, and a Catalog API specifically for managing products and categories. 

    The dev docs explicitly call out native mobile apps as a supported use case: the front end can be a CMS, native mobile app, kiosk, or static site, and BigCommerce handles the order, payment, and catalog backend.

    The structural advantage on BigCommerce is checkout. Where Shopify’s checkout is locked to Shopify’s surface, BigCommerce’s is open: you can fully customize the checkout flow in a headless or app context, which gives more flexibility for brands with non-standard payment requirements, B2B quote-to-order workflows, or regional payment methods that don’t fit cleanly inside a Shopify-rendered checkout.

    Catalyst is BigCommerce’s headless framework, built on Next.js and now integrated with the MakeSwift page-building tool BigCommerce acquired. 

    Like Hydrogen on the Shopify side, Catalyst is a web-side framework, not a mobile app SDK. But the same Storefront API powering a Catalyst web build can also power a mobile app, which is why headless brands tend to find BigCommerce more flexible for ambitious cross-channel architectures.

    The B2B Edition is the other place BigCommerce pulls ahead for app-relevant use cases. Customer-specific pricing, contracted catalogs, sales rep “act as” flows, and quote-to-order workflows are all exposed via API and survive the trip to a mobile app. 

    On Shopify, B2B is improving, but it’s less mature than many other platforms (including BigCommerce) for the same operations.

    For more on BigCommerce-specific app builds, see the Vendrux guide to BigCommerce mobile app development.

    The Mobile App Builder Ecosystem on Each Platform

    No-code mobile app builders are a major advancement in mobile app development for ecommerce brands over the last few years.

    With these tools, you can launch a fast, functional mobile app, without the massive cost and time required to have a fully custom app developed from scratch.

    It’s also the biggest difference to consider between BigCommerce and Shopify, when it comes to launching a mobile app.

    Mobile App Builders on Shopify

    The Shopify mobile app builder ecosystem is the largest in ecommerce by a wide margin. There are nearly 100 apps currently listed in the Shopify App Store under “mobile app builder,” which all work primarily the same way.

    These tools are virtually all DIY SaaS platforms, template-based drag-and-drop tools that let you compile a new front end for your app, which connects with your Shopify backend via the APIs mentioned above.

    These tools have limitations and pain points, as is the nature of template-driven SaaS tools. But names like Tapcart and Shopney can produce a solid result for a lot of ecommerce stores, not to mention the dozens of similar tools competing with them.

    Mobile App Builders on BigCommerce

    BigCommerce’s mobile app builder ecosystem is much thinner. The BigCommerce App Marketplace mobile app category lists a small handful of vendors, some with minimal or no reviews.

    The reason is straightforward: Shopify has the wider customer base, so most app vendors build for Shopify, not BigCommerce.

    App builders like Tapcart and Shopney don’t work with BigCommerce. To do so, they’d require an overhaul of their backend to be compatible with BigCommerce’s APIs, and for the majority of app builders, the demand from BigCommerce merchants is not big enough to justify the work to do this.

    Vendrux – Custom Mobile Apps for Shopify and BigCommerce

    There’s an exception to the above.

    Our company, Vendrux, fits into the broad “mobile app builder” conversation. We help ecommerce brands launch their own mobile apps, without the cost and complexity of hiring a development team or a traditional mobile app development agency.

    The biggest difference is, unlike a Tapcart or a Shopney, Vendrux works for sites on any ecommerce platform. Including Shopify, BigCommerce, and any other platform you can name.

    The reason is that Vendrux doesn’t rely on platform APIs to power your app. We use your existing tech stack as the foundation for a custom mobile app – meaning it works the same no matter the platform.

    You get a native, fully custom mobile app, with the core content and design all managed through your web backend (Shopify admin, BigCommerce dashboard, or a custom backend – it doesn’t matter).

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

    It’s comparable in cost to an app builder, with much less work required, much easier to manage, and it’s guaranteed to work no matter your backend, no matter how custom your site is.

    The Cost of Building a Custom App from Scratch (on Either Platform)

    Skip the app builder route and you’re looking at custom development. That means hiring engineers (or an agency), writing iOS and Android code from scratch, integrating directly against either platform’s API surface, and shipping the result through the app stores yourself.

    The cost of building a custom mobile app is typically six figures plus – and could easily be $500K or more, for a store with a lot of custom parts.

    Then there’s recurring maintenance and operating costs on top of the upfront cost, which could add another $100K+ in annual expenses, just to keep up with API updates, OS releases, and routine feature additions and bug fixes.

    When it comes to building a custom app from scratch, the platform decision doesn’t make a huge amount of difference.

    Shopify’s API is well-documented; BigCommerce’s is more permissive and gives you more checkout flexibility. 

    Neither difference is large enough to make custom development meaningfully cheaper or faster. The custom app is a multi-year commitment regardless of which platform sits underneath it.

    For the vast majority of ecommerce businesses, building a fully custom app from the ground up is rarely the best choice – not when there’s an ecosystem of more cost-efficient mobile app builders out there, plus Vendrux as a tech-agnostic alternative for building custom mobile apps.

    Should You Switch Platforms Just to Launch a Mobile App?

    So, let’s say you’re on BigCommerce already, and thinking whether it’s worth moving to Shopify for the wider choice of mobile app vendors. Or you’re on Shopify, and considering moving to BigCommerce for better customizability and headless flexibility.

    Is there any merit to replatforming, for the sake of your mobile app?

    The answer: almost never. Replatforming is such a big project, especially for a well-established ecommerce brand. It’s not something you want to do on a whim.

    It’s absolutely worth having your own mobile app. But it’s not worth spending six-seven figures to migrate your whole ecommerce operation, just because you think it’s going to be easier to do a mobile app on Shopify.

    This is especially true when you’ve got Vendrux, which lets you build a custom app for your brand no matter the platform you’re on.

    It doesn’t mean there’s not a case to replatform – whether it’s moving to Shopify for the ease of use and wide ecosystem of vendors and tools, or moving off Shopify to BigCommerce for added flexibility or stronger B2B features.

    But with Vendrux powering your app, you can remove this part from the equation, and evaluate each platform on its merits – and know that your mobile app is solved either way. 

    Running a serious ecommerce store on Shopify or BigCommerce?

    Vendrux builds your iOS and Android apps on top of your existing storefront. Your catalog, checkout, integrations, and customer experience all carry over, with no rebuild and no second codebase to maintain.

    Launch in around 30 days on a flat subscription. No revenue share, no API contracts to babysit, and the app survives a future platform migration if you ever switch.

    Book a Free Strategy Call

    Choosing the Right Approach for Your BigCommerce or Shopify Mobile App

    Both BigCommerce and Shopify can be powerful backends for a successful ecommerce store – and a successful mobile app.

    Both have strong APIs, good documentation, decent flexibility. The vendor ecosystem is a big differentiating factor. But with Vendrux existing as a tech-agnostic option, these questions are largely redundant.

    Our answer: pick the platform that powers your core ecommerce operation the best. Build a strong website, make sure it’s fast, functional, and works well on both desktop and mobile: then extend it and launch a custom mobile app with Vendrux.

    Want to see what’s possible? Book a free strategy call to see what Vendrux can do for your store.

  • Ecommerce Mobile App Buyer’s Guide: How to Choose the Right App, Build Approach, and Vendor for Your Brand (2026)

    Mobile is now the dominant surface in ecommerce. Adobe Digital Insights pegged mobile at 51.4% of US online spend in October 2025, up 11.6% year over year, on track to keep climbing through 2026.

    And with mobile driving most of your traffic, the case for launching a dedicated mobile app keeps getting stronger.

    The path you pick for ecommerce mobile app development locks in your cost structure, time-to-market, and team workload for years, so picking it the right way matters more than picking it fast.

    There are four real decisions to make, in order:

    1. What type of app does your brand need? Fully native, hybrid, PWA, or a native app powered by your existing website?
    2. What build approach fits your team? In-house engineering, an agency, a DIY app builder, or a fully managed website-powered service?
    3. What does the path cost over three years, not just at launch?
    4. Which specific vendor or agency should you engage inside the category you’ve picked?

    Each section below answers one of those decisions. By the end, you’ll have a solid understanding of how ecommerce mobile apps get built, what you want yours to look like, and the best way to get there.

    The Different Types of Mobile App

    A “mobile app” can be multiple, meaningfully different products. 

    This is important to know before you start building your app may save you a lot of wasted time and money.

    Fully native

    These are separate iOS and Android codebases written in platform-native languages (Swift, Kotlin). Native apps have the best possible performance and full access to every native device feature, though two codebases mean more work to build, higher cost, and a lot more work to maintain.

    Cross-platform

    Cross-platform apps have a single shared codebase that compiles to both iOS and Android. The dominant frameworks are React Native and Flutter. When a brand says “we built a native app from scratch,” they almost always mean a React Native or Flutter app. It’s faster and cheaper than fully native; with small performance trade-offs on heavy interactions. Most modern custom ecommerce apps fall in this category.

    WebView

    A basic native shell wrapped around the brand’s website. Cheap, fast to build, but Apple specifically scrutinizes WebView-only apps and routinely rejects them under App Store Review Guideline 4.2. What the customer downloads doesn’t feel native, and the App Store presence is fragile. 

    Template native apps

    This is what you get with most SaaS app builders. The codebase is usually something like React Native under the hood, but the apps are assembled from templates rather than built feature by feature. Fast to launch and inexpensive to start, but the nature of these apps means limitations you have to work with.

    Hybrid apps

    Hybrid apps are apps that utilize web code alongside native app code. Your app ships as a real, fully-functioning mobile app, but a lot of the design and features are carried over from your existing web codebase.

    Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

    A PWA is a website built to feel more like an app, and is installable to the home screen (albeit not a one-click install), with some access to push notifications. PWAs aren’t real native apps, and not a realistic substitute for the kind of app you find in the App Store, but it is a solid first step if you want to provide a better mobile user experience.

    The Four Most Common Ways to Build an Ecommerce Mobile App

    It’s important to know the difference between native, cross-platform, PWA, etc – but the real decision is in the kind of vendor you’re going to go with.

    In this sense, there are generally four different ways your mobile app gets built. And the investment, payback period, end result and recurring overhead can be very different, depending on which you choose.

    In-house development

    In-house means your brand hires mobile engineers and ships the app from inside the company.

    It treats the app as a permanent product the team owns, with everything that implies: roadmap ownership, release cycles, on-call coverage for production issues, and the headcount to support it.

    The realistic team is two or more mobile engineers, sometimes a backend lead and a designer, a project manager or product manager, and QA capacity. 

    It’ll likely take six to twelve months to launch v1 of your app, if everything goes well. You’ll also need to keep your team in place to maintain the app, and keeping your app and website in sync means coordination between your web and app teams has to be on point.

    “When you develop an app you can’t just have one person. When we built the app, the maintenance became very heavy. To keep a platform like this in-house I feel like you’d probably need around six people.”
    — Kenneth Chan, Founder & CEO, Tobi

    Agency or dev shop

    It’s a lot more common for brands to hire an agency or mobile development shop to build their app.

    It could be a full-stack agency or a specialist mobile firm. This is the common path when a brand wants a custom build but doesn’t want to hire engineers permanently.

    This can be costly. ScienceSoft’s published software development cost calculator estimates a moderate-complexity cross-platform mobile app at $30,000-$70,000 and a native app for a regulated sector at $150,000-$250,000. 

    Specialty mobile agencies for ecommerce typically come in higher: a custom branded ecommerce mobile app from an established agency commonly costs $150,000 to $500,000+ for a launched v1, plus a maintenance retainer or hourly rates afterward.

    It is generally more cost-effective than hiring an in-house team (as you don’t need to worry about hiring, and all the extras that come with having staff on the payroll). But it’s still, honestly, overkill for most ecommerce mobile apps. 

    DIY no-code app builder

    A DIY app builder is a SaaS platform that converts your storefront into a mobile app via a drag-and-drop editor. The brand owns the configuration; the vendor owns the codebase. 

    Builders are faster than an agency, cheaper than in-house, and don’t require engineers. And realistically, a much better way to build an ecommerce app.

    Cost-wise, you’re looking at a recurring subscription of anywhere from $200-$1500 per month (with the cost of your team’s time on top of that; potentially somewhere in the range of 40 hours per month).

    That’s a much better deal than a mid-six figure bill, plus the recurring overhead, for a native app from an agency. The difference in quality (real, but marginal) from a custom native build is not worth the difference in what it costs you.

    Vendrux

    Vendrux builds and maintains a native iOS and Android app powered by your existing web platform. 

    It’s basically a category of its own. You get a custom app, with app-exclusive experiences and features – yet without a separate codebase, no compatibility issues with your website (everything from your website works in the app automatically), and without the cost and time investment of “native” development.

    The cost is comparable to that of most app builders, but the effort required from your team is less, because Vendrux’s team does virtually everything for you.

    Brands like Jack & Jones, John Varvatos, Kiokii, and Pharmazone are a few examples of brands that shipped apps with Vendrux. Our partners see app users routinely contribute 20-30% of their total online revenue (and up to 60% for top performers, like Pharmazone) – proving their apps really resonate with their audience.

    “We couldn’t find another company that could offer the same features at the same price point, same time to market, and make it as easy as Vendrux could.”
    — Svend Hansen, Product Owner at Bestseller

    “Vendrux keeps this whole thing simple and streamlined. No more juggling two different platforms, no more wasted time on maintenance.”
    — Eric Lowe, Director of Ecommerce at XCVI

    It’s essentially an agency, except you get more control over the app (you manage the bulk of the experience though your web platform), and it’s nowhere near the cost and complexity of an agency maintaining a separate codebase.

    Ecommerce Mobile App Vendors and Agencies Compared

    Now let’s get practical. Let’s look at some of the actual companies operating in the ecommerce mobile app space, helping ecommerce brands go live with branded mobile apps.

    We’re not going to go too deep into the pros and cons of each – that would be dishonest, since we haven’t worked with all of them hands-on. And regardless, most of the upsides/downsides are shared across the category.

    Use this as a starting point for your vendor search, then go out and research each one in more detail, based on what seems like the best fit for your needs.

    DIY Shopify-focused builders

    Most DIY app builders are built specifically for Shopify. You’ll find and install the app from the Shopify App Store, sign up, (usually) compile the app yourself, and manage the day-to-day of the app yourself as well.

    Some of the popular names here include:

    • Tapcart
    • Shopney
    • Superfans
    • SimiCart
    • OneMobile
    • MageNative

    All up, there are nearly 100 apps on the Shopify App Store in the “mobile app builder” category; so you’re not short of choice.

    Tapcart (widest reach; one of the oldest tools in the category), Shopney (over 700 reviews on the app store), Superfans (over 800 reviews – formerly known as Vajro) are probably the most widely used.

    You’ll want to do your own research here. But before you do, consider the other options, and whether there’s a more efficient way to get to the app you want.

    Multi-platform app builders

    The bulk of the DIY app builder ecosystem targets Shopify merchants.

    The reason is that template-driven tools use platform APIs to sync up with your store’s product and order data. Most tools focus on building and maintaining only an integration with Shopify, since that’s the biggest market.

    Brands on other platforms typically have a much smaller market to choose from, if they’re looking for a DIY app builder.

    Some options that work for non-Shopify brands include:

    • JMango360
    • Twinr
    • AppMySite
    • BuildFire

    JMango360 is an API-driven app builder, supporting a few different platforms (Magento, BigCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud included). 

    Twinr and AppMySite are both built around webviews, which lets them convert websites from various platforms into mobile apps.

    BuildFire is more general-purpose, with a plugin marketplace and broader use cases, but it isn’t built specifically for ecommerce, so its integrations with the major platforms aren’t as deep as the alternatives.

    As with the Shopify-focused category, do your own research before picking one. But before you do, consider whether one of the other categories fits your situation better.

    Ecommerce development agencies

    There are thousands of development agencies across the world, most of whom could build you a good mobile app.

    Whether it’s the best option or not is up for debate – we covered that above. If you are looking for a custom “from scratch” build, here are some mobile app development companies to look at:

    The best tip to find a development agency is to head to Clutch and look through the options, look at reviews, and narrow the choices down.

    It’s important to do your due diligence before signing a contract here, as you’re looking at a mid-five figures cost (at the bare minimum), so the cost of choosing the wrong partner is significant.

    Vendrux

    Vendrux is really in a category of its own: the cost of an app builder, but the attention, care and flexibility of an agency.

    Vendrux has worked with 2,000+ brands including Jack & Jones, Bestseller, John Varvatos, Tadashi Shoji, Kiokii, and Pharmazone.

    Some of the apps built with Vendrux

    Some concrete outcomes:

    • Pharmazone runs 63% of online revenue through its app and sees 15x revenue per app user
    • Tadashi Shoji sees 10x ARPU and 18% of total online revenue from the app
    • John Varvatos has done close to $1M in app sales with 10x revenue per user
    • Kiokii gets close to 40% of total online revenue through the app from a small fraction of total users. 

    It’s the best option if you want an app that builds on top of your existing systems, not parallel to them, and you don’t want to be limited by templates, platform APIs, and the lag times of a native dev team.

    A native iOS and Android app powered by your existing website. Around 30 days to launch. Flat subscription, no revenue share. We handle the build, the App Store, and ongoing maintenance.

    See what your store looks like as a real native app, before you commit to anything.

    Get a Free App Preview

    How to Choose: A Decision Framework for Ecommerce Brands

    The best development approach can end up being different from brand to brand.

    The right approach for your business depends on revenue band, ecommerce platform, internal dev capacity, customization needs, and business model. 

    Here’s a rough breakdown:

    • If you want a managed solution, with relatively low overhead, low operational lift, that builds on top of your existing website (and works with any ecommerce platform): choose Vendrux.
    • If you want to manage and iterate on the app yourself; perhaps you’re in a lower revenue band (Tapcart.
    • If you want the same, but you’re not on Shopify: consider a general-purpose app builder like AppMySite or JMango360.
    • If you need heavy app-specific customizations, heavy native device integrations (and you have the budget): look for a custom development agency.

    Alternatively, if you’re not sure about launching an app yet? Don’t rush into it. Consider shipping a PWA first, perhaps gather some intel on mobile app vendors, but don’t jump in and launch an app just because you think you’re supposed to have one.

    Take your time, map out the business case – then come back to our guide once you’re comfortable it’s time to launch your app.

    Final Thoughts

    A mobile app could be the best investment you make for your brand. But like any investment, it depends on what you put in.

    If you overpay, or build an app that takes too much time, effort and money to run, your investment won’t look so good.

    Same thing goes if you build an app that doesn’t provide the kind of experience your users expect – you’ll end up with few users, minimal revenue, and an investment that provides very little return.

    We can’t tell you the best option for your specific business, your tech stack, your requirements.

    We can, however, present Vendrux as the best ecommerce mobile app solution for the widest range of brands – from Shopify to Magento, from luxury fashion to automotive parts brands.

    If you want to see what Vendrux is capable of, and discuss your options in-depth with our app experts, get in touch and get a free preview of your app.

    We’ll walk you through the process, and give an honest assessment on the best long-term approach for your app.

  • The Real Cost of Maintaining a Mobile App for an Ecommerce Brand

    When you scope a mobile app for an ecommerce brand, the conversation almost always centers on the build cost. 

    An agency might quote you $100K for a custom React Native project. You might compare that against a DIY or service-driven app builder and the monthly or yearly subscription on their pricing table. You might weigh these two costs against each other, to estimate the ROI potential of your mobile app over time.

    You might, on the basis of the quotes you’ve been given, see the “one-time cost” of a custom project as a preferable option to an ongoing subscription that bills every month.

    But here’s what you’re missing: the upfront cost of a mobile app is far from the end of the billing picture.

    The real cost of owning a mobile app shows up after launch. Maintenance costs, OS updates, new features, fixes, updates to follow design or branding updates on your website.

    It’s a job that never ends. And failing to understand the long-term cost of a mobile app is the biggest mistake we see ecommerce companies make.

    Read on and learn everything you need to know about the long-term maintenance costs of mobile apps, and how to make sure these costs don’t come back to bite you.

    What Mobile App Maintenance Includes

    Mobile app maintenance isn’t a small bucket of bug fixes. It’s a regular, full-time job.

    “We had [an app] in 2014 and found that it was too much to maintain. To keep a platform like this in-house I feel like you’d probably need around six people.”
    — Kenneth Chan, Founder & CEO, Tobi

    For an ecommerce app, the ongoing work falls into five buckets:

    Platform updates

    Apple ships a major iOS release every year, plus several point releases. Google does the same with Android. Each release deprecates APIs, changes permissions, tightens privacy rules, and occasionally breaks behavior your app depended on. 

    Apps that don’t keep up get warnings, then rejections, then get pulled from the App Store. Staying compliant with these rules is non-negotiable.

    Third-party SDK or API updates

    Every integration your app uses – analytics, push, payment, attribution, reviews – has its own code, and its own SDK or API used to make it work in your app.

    Each one publishes updates. Each one occasionally breaks.

    If a push provider or an analytics tool updates their API, they’re not going to personally call you and make sure the new version works in your app. That’s on you.

    Website parity

    Most ecommerce websites aren’t static. They’re constantly moving, getting refreshed.

    You add a new reviews widget, a product configurator. You change the hierarchy on your PDPs. You update your homepage, add a new collection.

    All this work needs to be replicated in your app, or your app and web experiences quickly drift apart, and end up looking like two different stores.

    Bug fixes and regressions

    Bugs are inevitable in software.

    It could be an edge case that wasn’t caught in testing. It could be a new integration. It could be one of the SDK or API updates mentioned above, which breaks your implementation.

    And the important thing about bugs is that one bug is easy to fix. But once you let multiple bugs accumulate, it’ll start to look as if the only way to fix them all is to tear down your code and start again.

    Performance and security

    You’ll (hopefully) acquire more and more users over time. That can add new problems that didn’t exist when you first launched the app.

    Apps that worked fine at 5,000 monthly active users start showing strain at 50,000. You get more crash reports, memory issues surface, and you may need to roll out patches to keep your app functioning well.

    What It Costs to Keep Up

    The industry rule of thumb for native mobile app maintenance is 15-25% of the original build cost per year.

    Realistically, we’ve found this to be a conservative estimate.

    Based on this, a $100K app will cost $15,000-$25,000 per year to maintain. A $150K app will cost $22,500-$37,500.

    But this typically assumes everything goes well, the only maintenance is routine maintenance, and there are no major feature additions or website parity updates required.

    Even if we assume the best, it’s still a recurring cost, like a tool subscription, which you can’t get away from.

    Why the Operational Tax Hurts More Than the Maintenance Bill

    The 15-25% maintenance cost estimate leaves out one important part.

    This cost is the pure dev hours – X hours, billed at $100 per hour (or however much you’re paying your mobile devs).

    That’s the visible cost. The hidden cost is the operational tax.

    Operational tax is the time your ecommerce team spends managing two different systems. Every meeting where someone says “and what about the app?” Every CRO experiment that wins on the website and doesn’t make it into the app. Every homepage refresh that ships on the web in three weeks and lands in the app eight weeks later. Every integration vendor your team chooses based partly on which ones the app supports.

    These are the patterns we consistently see and hear from ecommerce teams running a custom-built mobile app:

    Decision lag

    Once you have two surfaces to think about, every product, marketing, and merchandising decision brings additional questions. 

    • Should this run only on the web?
    • Only in the app? Both? When? 

    It makes procurement processes longer, and rules out some moves that seem perfect but for the mobile app question.

    Feature drift

    Let’s say you put the app question to the side. You say, “let’s add the feature; we’ll work it out in the app later.”

    Six months after launch, your website has 8-12 new features the app doesn’t have. Twelve months in, that gap is 20+ features. 

    The app starts feeling stale. Customers notice – they switched to the app expecting a better experience and got a thinner one. Now your best customers are upset they’re being served a weaker version of your website.

    Talent dependency

    Quick, cheap maintenance depends on having the right developers readily available.

    You need people who know the code, who can ship fixes without breaking other areas of the app.

    If you rely on freelancers, the same people might not be available right away. If you use an agency, there might be a lag time between the bug report and implementation.

    If you hire developers in-house, you have HR and all the associated costs of having employees to worry about. And then there’s still the risk that the person who knows everything about the codebase leaves, and no one else knows what does what under the hood.

    Opportunity cost

    Because of the extra work it takes to keep your app in line with your website, you start making decisions based on what’s easiest, not what’s best for the brand.

    You decide not to build a new product configurator tool, because it’s going to take 2x as long to build it for both website and app. You don’t integrate with a new personalization tool because it’s not compatible with your app. You decide against an overdue website redesign, because that means you need to redesign your app as well.

    This is the biggest hidden cost, because it’s literally hidden. It doesn’t show up on your expense report. It’s not money lost, it’s value you could have realized, but didn’t, because the operational tax holding you back.

    A Year in the Life of a $30M Brand With a Custom Mobile App

    Picture a $30M Shopify Plus apparel brand. In early 2025, they scoped a custom React Native app with a specialist mobile agency. 

    Build cost: $400,000. Build time: 8 months. The agency stayed on for a Year 2 maintenance retainer at $80,000 a year. Launch went well. The app is clean, fast, real native components, in the App Store.

    Q1

    iOS 19 ships. The agency spends three weeks bringing the app into compliance with two deprecated APIs and a tightened permissions model. The brand’s internal team doesn’t see the work – the agency is paid for it out of the retainer. So far, so good.

    Q2

    The brand’s CRO team turns on AI-driven product recommendations on the website – a Nosto / Rebuy integration the web team adds in a single sprint. 

    Category pages, PDPs, and cart all start surfacing personalized “you might also like” modules. The app keeps showing its hand-built static product carousels because the app’s recommendation logic was custom-coded at launch, not wired to the recommendation engine. 

    The agency quotes four weeks to connect it. For those four weeks (and the conversion lift the website is already logging), app users get the old static carousels.

    Q3

    Marketing wants a homepage refresh for fall. The website ships the new homepage in three weeks. The app version takes another seven weeks because the new homepage uses content blocks the app can’t render. The brand ships the fall campaign with two homepages live for two months.

    Q4

    The reviews widget vendor updates their mobile SDK. The app build that pulls in the new SDK ships with a crash on Android 14. The agency rolls back to the previous version. The crash is fixed three weeks later in a hotfix. The brand’s app reviews drop from 4.7 to 4.4 in the meantime.

    —-

    Across the year, the agency bill stays at $80,000. The internal cost – ecommerce manager time on app coordination, marketing time on dual-launch logistics, support time fielding bug reports – runs another six to ten hours a week across two senior team members. 

    Conservatively, that’s another $40,000-$60,000 in opportunity cost.

    The Year 2 cost of operating this app sits somewhere between $120,000 and $140,000, before counting any new feature work. The app, meanwhile, is now behind the website on at least a dozen features. 

    The team is starting to talk about a “Year 3 modernization,”, which really means rebuilding the app and relaunching it on a new listing, without the negative reviews it’s been accumulating.

    Learn more about the cost to build a Shopify mobile app.

    How to Scope Total Cost Before You Commit

    If you’re scoping a mobile app and the only number in front of you is the build cost, you’re missing half of the picture.

    You don’t need the upfront cost – you need the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

    Here are some things you need to take into account:

    Year 2-5 maintenance

    Apply the 15-25% rule to your build estimate. Multiply by four years. Compare that number to the build cost. 

    For most custom apps, the four-year maintenance figure is larger than the build by Year 4, meaning the build number you’re staring at is less than half of what you’ll pay over the life of the app.

    Operational hours

    Estimate how many hours per week your ecommerce, marketing, and customer experience teams will spend coordinating between web and app. Multiply by loaded hourly cost. Multiply by 50 weeks. That’s the operational tax line item, and it’s usually larger than people assume.

    Drift risk

    Ask the vendor or your internal team how feature parity between web and app gets maintained over time. If the answer is “every feature gets built twice,” realize that you’re building a second storefront to manage.

    How Vendrux Simplifies Mobile App Maintenance

    A large reason Vendrux exists is the maintenance cost and operational lift of running a mobile app.

    The traditional model, running a mobile app as a separate surface, with a separate codebase, is impractical for ecommerce brands, whose focus is typically on marketing and merchandising, not tech.

    With Vendrux, the operational tax doesn’t exist.

    Vendrux ships custom apps that are fully synced with your website. Everything on your site works in the app, and updates instantly when you update it on your site.

    If an integration changes their API, if you update your homepage, add a new feature to your PDPs, that reflects instantly in your app, with no additional development needed.

    Our team handles all the technical app maintenance and regular updates for you. We are your app team, letting your team’s focus remain on what drives the business forward.

    You’ll likely spend a few hours per month on the app – not 40 hours a week. Your maintenance bill is a flat subscription, not a costly retainer or inflated dev hours every time you need a fix or a feature update.

    Brands like John Varvatos, BESTSELLER, Tadashi Shoji, and Pharmazone all ship and maintain mobile apps on this approach without dedicated in-house mobile teams. The apps run on the web stacks each brand already uses, and simplifies what it takes for these brands to provide a native mobile app for their best customers.

    Some of the high-revenue ecommerce apps built with Vendrux. See more examples here

    It’s a better way to ship a custom mobile app for an ecommerce brand.

    Want to see what’s possible? Get in touch and get a free app preview, and you’ll see what your site could look like as an app, as well as a walkthrough from our app team of how we’ll help you build, launch and maintain the perfect mobile app.

  • The Ecommerce Platforms Powering Enterprise Brands in 2026

    The Ecommerce Platforms Powering Enterprise Brands in 2026

    The platforms running Adidas, Heinz, and L’Oréal’s online stores are not the platforms running your favorite Shopify boutique or streetwear brand.

    The enterprise commerce stack lives in its own world. It’s a world where Shopify isn’t the obvious leader, where Salesforce and SAP still quietly power more of the world’s largest retailers than most observers realize, and where the top 10 retailers on the planet often run no commercial platform at all.

    Here’s what powers enterprise commerce in 2026:

    • Salesforce Commerce Cloud runs much of global apparel, footwear, and beauty (Adidas, Puma, Lululemon, L’Oréal, Cole Haan, Columbia, Lacoste).
    • SAP Commerce Cloud runs the industrial and B2B end of the spectrum (Bosch, Siemens, 3M, General Electric, Levi Strauss, Nikon, Johnson & Johnson).
    • Adobe Commerce runs customization-heavy retailers and franchise operators (HanesBrands, Alshaya Group, Mitsubishi Motors, AkzoNobel, Krispy Kreme).
    • Shopify Plus runs the modern direct-to-consumer wave (Allbirds, Gymshark, SKIMS, Kylie Cosmetics) and a growing list of legacy CPG brands (Heinz, Mattel, Bombas).
    • commercetools, VTEX, and Spryker are the composable and headless challengers (Audi, Ulta Beauty, Whirlpool, Carrefour, Hilti, Aldi).
    • The very top of the market (Amazon, Walmart US, Apple, Target) runs custom infrastructure, not commercial platforms.

    That summary covers most of the enterprise commerce landscape today. The rest of this article walks platform by platform: what each one is, what kind of brand it tends to attract, and what the verified customer list looks like.

    The Biggest Enterprise Ecommerce Platforms At A Glance

    The data below on enterprise commerce share, and the most notable enterprise brand examples, comes from two primary sources: BuiltWith’s Top 10,000 most-trafficked sites, which filters out the millions of SMB stores that distort the broader market, and the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, the industry’s standard ranking of enterprise platforms by capability and execution.

    We used that to put together the following list of the top ecommerce platforms used by enterprise companies today:

    Platform Gartner 2025 Typical brand profile
    Salesforce Commerce Cloud Leader (10th year) Global B2C apparel, footwear, beauty, omnichannel
    SAP Commerce Cloud Leader (11th year) Industrial, B2B, manufacturing, SAP ERP shops
    Adobe Commerce Leader Multi-brand B2C, franchise retail, customization-heavy
    Shopify Plus Leader Modern DTC, CPG sub-brands, fast retail
    commercetools Leader (6th year) Composable, API-first, headless-first enterprises
    Oracle NetSuite SuiteCommerce Niche player NetSuite ERP customers, mid-enterprise B2B
    BigCommerce Visionary Multi-store retail, mid-enterprise B2B
    VTEX Visionary LATAM-led globals, multinational CPG
    Spryker Visionary B2B manufacturers, industrial commerce
    Elastic Path Niche player Composable specialists, telecom
    Custom / in-house n/a Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Target, Inditex

    A note on the BuiltWith data. BuiltWith captures technology it can detect from a storefront’s HTML, so it systematically undercounts headless backends like Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP, and commercetools that sit behind custom or third-party frontends. Their real enterprise footprint, measured by Fortune 500 customer count and Gartner placement, is much larger than raw BuiltWith share suggests. 

    The opposite is also true: a frontend CMS like Amplience shows up at 11.1% of the Top 10K, but it’s not a commerce backend at all. It sits on top of one.

    With that caveat in mind, let’s dive deeper into each platform, breaking down what it is, and the notable brands running their digital operations on each one.

    Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Now Agentforce Commerce)

    Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the platform that defines enterprise B2C commerce in 2026. It began life as Demandware in 2004, was acquired by Salesforce in 2016 for $2.8 billion, and now sits at the center of Salesforce’s broader CRM and commerce stack. 

    The 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant marked Salesforce’s 10th consecutive year as a Leader in digital commerce, tied with SAP for the longest tenure in the category.

    The customer list is the giveaway. According to Salesforce’s own 2016 launch announcement, early Commerce Cloud customers included Cole Haan, Puma, and Suitsupply. Adidas has been a Demandware customer since 2011 and now sits on the full Salesforce stack. 

    Puma has a published Salesforce case study documenting its global replatform. L’Oréal, Lululemon, Columbia Sportswear, and Lacoste are all widely documented Commerce Cloud customers across multiple industry analyses. 

    There’s a consistent pattern: global apparel, footwear, and beauty brands with sophisticated omnichannel requirements default to SFCC.

    What makes Commerce Cloud the default for that segment, as much as the commerce engine itself, is the surrounding Salesforce ecosystem. 

    If a brand already runs Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud is the only platform that shares the customer data model by default. For a global apparel brand managing tens of millions of profiles across dozens of countries, that integration is worth a lot.

    Further reading: Mobile App Development for Salesforce Commerce Cloud Brands

    SAP Commerce Cloud

    SAP Commerce Cloud is the platform you’ve heard the least about and seen the most in real life. It originated as Hybris, a German commerce platform acquired by SAP in 2013 for $1.5 billion. It has now been a Gartner Leader for 11 consecutive years, the only vendor positioned in the quadrant every year since the category began in 2014.

    The customer list reflects its industrial center of gravity. According to the Wikipedia entry on Hybris, confirmed customers across the platform’s history have included General Electric, ABB, 3M, Levi Strauss, Nikon, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Thomson Reuters, and West Marine. 

    AppsRunTheWorld’s vendor database adds Reliance and Tata (India’s two largest conglomerates), Qantas Airways, Henkel, Amway, Haier, and Nestlé. Bosch and Siemens are widely cited SAP Commerce customers in industry analyses.

    The center of gravity here is industrial manufacturing, B2B distribution, and large multinationals with deep SAP investments in their back office. When the same vendor runs commerce, inventory, billing, and financial consolidation, the brittle middleware layer between commerce and the rest of the business disappears. 

    For a manufacturer with hundreds of regional pricing books, complex tax requirements, and SKUs running into the millions, that single data model is hard to give up.

    Adobe Commerce (Magento)

    Adobe Commerce is the most flexible platform in the enterprise tier. It started as Magento, an open-source commerce platform launched in 2008. Adobe acquired it in 2018 for $1.68 billion and folded it into Adobe Experience Cloud. 

    The platform is a 2025 Gartner Leader and one of the most-deployed commerce platforms across the BuiltWith Top 10K.

    The customer base, verified through Adobe’s own published case studies, tells a different story than Salesforce’s. 

    • HanesBrands runs Adobe Commerce for its Australasia operation and credits the platform with a 41% lift from behavioral data personalization. 
    • Alshaya Group, the 130-year-old Middle Eastern franchise operator behind regional Starbucks, Pottery Barn, and Victoria’s Secret stores, runs its digital retail transformation on Adobe Commerce. 
    • Mitsubishi Motors uses it to manage product configurations and accessories online. AkzoNobel manages thousands of branded websites on the platform. 
    • Krispy Kreme runs its Australia and New Zealand ecommerce on Adobe Commerce. 
    • ASUS chose it for B2B. 
    • OTTO, the German retailer, uses Adobe Commerce as part of its broader Adobe stack.

    The reason Adobe Commerce attracts that crowd is customization. The platform exposes its codebase in a way that Salesforce and SAP don’t, which means agencies can build deeply distinctive storefronts. 

    It also offers genuine multi-store administration, which suits multi-brand retail conglomerates that want one back office running ten storefronts. Adobe’s broader Experience Cloud integrations are stronger than anyone else’s at content-and-commerce.

    Related: Mobile App Development for Adobe Commerce & Magento Brands

    Shopify Plus

    Shopify Plus is the most interesting story in enterprise commerce right now. The 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant put Shopify in the Leaders quadrant, and according to Kasama Digital’s analysis of the report, Shopify and Salesforce are now “neck and neck” at the top of the chart. 

    That’s a remarkable position for a platform that didn’t exist as a serious enterprise option a decade ago.

    The Shopify Plus customer list has shifted substantially in the past five years. The modern direct-to-consumer side is still the core. Gymshark is the canonical example: it grew from a UK fitness brand to a £128 million DTC operation on Shopify Plus, and its migration from Adobe Commerce is one of the most-cited replatforms in the industry. 

    Allbirds, SKIMS, Kylie Cosmetics, Fashion Nova, MVMT, Bombas, and Rebecca Minkoff all run on Shopify Plus as well.

    The legacy side has expanded faster. 

    • Heinz migrated to Shopify Plus during the pandemic. 
    • Mattel runs Barbie, Hot Wheels, and Mattel Creations on it. 
    • Spanx, BBC merchandise, and Staples Canada have all replatformed onto Shopify Plus from older systems. 

    The brands moving onto the platform now are no longer the boutique DTC stories of 2018. They’re CPG giants and Fortune 500 sub-brands.

    What makes the platform work at this tier is speed. Shopify Plus implementations launch in weeks rather than quarters. The merchant admin is genuinely friendly, which matters for brands that want their ecommerce team (not their engineering team) launching the next campaign, and the Hydrogen framework gives engineering teams a clean path to custom frontends when they want one.

    Further reading: The Complete Guide to Shopify Plus Mobile App Development

    commercetools

    commercetools is the platform that defined the composable commerce movement. Founded in Berlin in 2012, hosted on Google Cloud, and now a Gartner Leader for the 6th consecutive year. 

    It’s the platform brands choose when their competitive advantage is the frontend experience and they want a backend that gets out of the way.

    The customer list, drawn from commercetools’ own published case studies, reflects that positioning. 

    • Audi runs commercetools for parts of its commerce stack. 
    • Bang & Olufsen unified its global brands on the platform. 
    • NBCUniversal built its shoppable-TV marketplace on commercetools with Mirakl. 
    • Ulta Beauty committed its entire business to a headless and MACH architecture on commercetools. 
    • Kmart Australia migrated to microservices on the platform. 
    • Woolworths used commercetools to launch its on-demand grocery service MILKRUN. 
    • Interflora UK, Zoro.com, Tekton, PetSmart, and Wild Fork Foods are all named customers.

    The architecture is what makes commercetools interesting. There’s no built-in storefront. The platform exposes a clean set of REST and GraphQL APIs, and the customer’s team builds the frontend, the merchant admin, and the orchestration on top. 

    That sounds like a lot of work because it is. The trade-off is total flexibility: the same backend serves web, mobile app, in-store kiosks, voice, and social commerce, each updating on its own schedule.

    VTEX

    VTEX is the LATAM enterprise leader with a growing global footprint. Founded in Brazil in 1999 and now operating across 44 countries with around 2,200 customers and 3,100 online stores, the platform has built its position on a headless API-first architecture and deep native support for the regulatory and payment complexity of emerging markets.

    The customer list is global but anchored in LATAM. According to VTEX’s own press disclosures and the INSEAD case study on the company, VTEX runs Whirlpool (across 15 countries), Sony, Carrefour, Walmart Argentina, Coca-Cola Andina, AB InBev, Stanley Black & Decker, Motorola, Nestlé, Colgate, Mondelez, Electrolux, Unilever (regional), Panasonic, and Xiaomi (Peru). 

    In beauty, the platform powers Natura, Avon, and The Body Shop, all now under Natura & Co. Magalu, Brazil’s largest non-Amazon retailer, runs its marketplace on VTEX.

    The strongest pitch here is for multinationals that need a single backend across very different regional commerce environments. 

    Brazil’s tax code is famously complex. Argentina’s payment systems are unlike anywhere else. VTEX handles both natively. A US-built platform like Salesforce or Adobe handles neither without expensive middleware.

    Spryker

    Spryker is the B2B specialist of the group. Founded in Germany, it’s headless and API-first like commercetools, but explicitly designed for the complexity of business-to-business commerce: hierarchical buyer accounts, negotiated contracts, master agreements, multi-step approval workflows, and dealer-network management.

    The customer list is heavy on industrial and B2B. According to Spryker’s published partner materials, the platform is “trusted by brands such as Aldi, Siemens, Hilti, and Ricoh.” 

    Toyota is also publicly named as a Spryker customer (typically interpreted as Toyota Material Handling, given the platform’s commerce positioning). 

    The brand-name density is lower than the consumer-focused platforms because the buyer is procurement, not retail.

    Oracle NetSuite SuiteCommerce, BigCommerce, and Elastic Path

    Three more platforms occupy smaller but meaningful slices of the enterprise market.

    Oracle NetSuite SuiteCommerce is the storefront layer on top of NetSuite ERP. Oracle acquired NetSuite in 2016 for $9.3 billion. It’s not a Gartner Leader, but it’s deeply embedded in mid-enterprise B2B. 

    The customer base is less consumer-visible than the others: thousands of mid-market manufacturers, wholesale distributors, professional services firms, and resellers running NetSuite as their core operating system extend naturally into commerce here.

    BigCommerce sits in the Visionaries quadrant. It started as a mid-market alternative to Shopify, has invested heavily in moving upmarket, and now occupies a real but smaller slice of the enterprise segment, particularly strong in multi-store retail and mid-enterprise B2B.

    Elastic Path is the smaller composable-commerce specialist, headquartered in Vancouver and founded in 2000. Its highest-profile published customer is T-Mobile, whose Cerberus initiative case study is featured prominently on the Elastic Path site. 

    It plays in the same conceptual space as commercetools but positions itself as more aggressively modular.

    Custom And In-House Platforms

    At the very top of the enterprise market, brands aren’t building on top of any commercial platform. As you can imagine, for businesses doing billions in annual turnover, these brands build custom.

    • Amazon runs entirely custom infrastructure and licenses pieces of it out as AWS Commerce services. 
    • Walmart US runs substantially custom, including the technology it inherited from its 2016 Jet.com acquisition.
    • Target, Costco, and Best Buy run custom or heavily customized legacy systems. 
    • Alibaba and JD.com run custom marketplaces. 
    • Apple runs the Apple Online Store as a fully proprietary system. eBay is custom by definition. 
    • Inditex (Zara) and H&M run substantially custom systems, often layered on top of selected enterprise components.

    For these companies, it just makes more sense to build your own platform, where you control every part of the code and aren’t reliant on a third-party vendor or software.

    What’s Changing in Enterprise Ecommerce

    How does the current state of enterprise ecommerce reflect ongoing trends or changes in the industry?

    First, composable commerce has moved from aspirational to mainstream at enterprise. 

    commercetools, VTEX, and Spryker now have the enterprise customer count and Gartner credibility to be taken seriously by buyers. The question is no longer whether to go composable, but which existing platform will let you do it without re-platforming. 

    Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe have all responded with headless deployment options of their own.

    Second, Shopify is genuinely competing at the top. The 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant put it neck and neck with Salesforce, and the customer wins are now CPG giants and Fortune 500 sub-brands, not just modern DTC startups. 

    The Fortune 500 industrial segment still defaults to Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe. The Fortune 500 consumer brand DTC arm increasingly defaults to Shopify Plus.

    Third, custom is still winning at the very top, and that isn’t changing. Amazon, Walmart, Apple, and the largest pure-play retailers continue to build their own platforms.

    The economics that drive that choice (commerce as competitive surface area, not operational expense) only become more favorable as those businesses grow.

    Fourth, the gap between platforms is narrower than the marketing implies. Every Gartner Leader now supports headless. Every Leader supports B2B. Every Leader supports multi-region, multi-currency, and complex catalogs. 

    The functional differences that drove most platform decisions in 2018 are now second-order.

    Where Vendrux Fits In

    Every business running on one of the platforms above is operating at the scale where having a dedicated mobile app is a necessity.

    Vendrux is a service built specifically for these brands. Vendrux builds native iOS and Android apps for enterprise ecommerce brands, powered by their existing tech stack.

    Unlike most mobile app vendors, Vendrux works with any ecommerce platform: Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce Enterprise, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, headless setups, custom builds, and even niche platforms.

    Vendrux allows these brands to launch a mobile app that’s fully synchronized with their website by default, and requires significantly fewer resources to maintain, compared to a custom app built from scratch.

    Brands like Tadashi Shoji (Adobe Commerce) and John Varvatos (Salesforce Commerce Cloud) launched their apps with Vendrux, without standing up a mobile team or commissioning a custom dev project. They now have a high-ROI retention channel, driving significant revenue with minimal overhead.

    Running an enterprise ecommerce brand?

    Want a low-maintenance mobile app, fully integrated with your existing stack?

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    The Short Version

    If there’s one thing to take from this article, it’s that the enterprise commerce market is not the SMB commerce market with bigger logos. It’s a separate ecosystem with its own logic.

    • Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, and Adobe Commerce remain the heavyweight Gartner Leaders running much of the world’s largest consumer and industrial brands. 
    • Shopify Plus has broken into that tier and now competes directly with the legacy platforms, particularly for large modern DTC brands and CPG sub-brands. 
    • commercetools, VTEX, and Spryker are the composable challengers, each anchored in a different segment of the market. 
    • NetSuite SuiteCommerce, BigCommerce, and Elastic Path occupy real but smaller niches.
    • And the very top of the market (Amazon, Walmart, Apple) runs nothing anyone else can buy.

    These are all heavyweight platforms, powering heavyweight brands, from Adidas to Puma to Heinz.

  • Do Customers Really Use Retail Apps?

    Do Customers Really Use Retail Apps?

    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).

    Annual Revenue App Customer % Revenue Contribution App Revenue
    $5M 5% 10% $500K
    $5M 10% 20% $1M
    $10M 5% 10% $1M
    $10M 10% 20% $2M
    $25M 5% 10% $2.5M
    $25M 10% 20% $5M
    $50M 5% 10% $5M
    $50M 10% 20% $10M
    $100M 5% 10% $10M
    $100M 10% 20% $20M

    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.

    Want to see what your app would look like?

    You’ve got the customer base, the repeat buyers, and now a rough sense of what the app channel could be worth. The piece still missing is what the app itself would look like for your brand.

    Vendrux lets you build a custom native app, without hiring developers or managing a separate platform. We’ll build you a free preview, so you can see your app in action and see what’s possible.

    Get a Free App Preview

    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.