Category: Blog

Subscriptions are one of the most seductive ideas in ecommerce. Recurring revenue, predictable cash flow, customers who renew themselves while you sleep.

The economics of subscriptions are hard to argue with. The issue is that they’re not as easy to get right as you think.

Too many brands launch subscriptions, get strong sign-ups, then bleed customers faster than expected, and the recurring revenue line that looked like a hockey stick in the deck flattens by month four.

The brands that build subscription programs that compound do a few things right that the others skip. They start with a product that genuinely fits the model. They design the offer so customers want to stay. They build the systems that keep churn low. And they treat subscriptions as a real product, not just a checkbox or a silver bullet.

This guide walks the full playbook for doing subscriptions right: figuring out whether subscription is the right model for your product, designing the offer, controlling churn, the implementation work on your store, picking the right app, and how a mobile app complements the rest.

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Subscriptions Are Powerful, But Not a Silver Bullet

The pitch for subscriptions writes itself. You acquire a customer once and they keep paying. 

CAC amortizes across many orders instead of one. Cash flow gets predictable. Inventory and forecasting get easier. Customer lifetime value goes up.

All of this can be true, when the underlying model is right. The problem is that “subscriptions” gets talked about as if it’s a feature you turn on, when it’s really a product decision that has to fit your category.

The product-fit test

Three questions decide whether subscriptions will work for what you sell:

1. Will the customer need this again? Coffee, supplements, pet food, beauty refills, household consumables: yes. Fashion, durable goods, occasional gifts: rarely.
2. On a predictable cadence? If consumption rate is roughly stable across customers, you can build frequency rules around it. If it varies wildly, your skip and pause volume will eat your operations team alive.
3. Is recurring delivery genuinely easier than reordering? This is the underrated question. If reordering takes 30 seconds and the customer thinks about the brand fondly each time, you’re competing against an emotional repurchase you might not want to remove. If reordering is annoying and the customer would rather it be automatic, subscription wins.

Categories where subscriptions consistently work are: 

• Consumables (coffee, vitamins, pet food, household goods)
• Beauty refills
• Replenishment-driven personal care
• Curated discovery boxes

Subscriptions are a much larger struggle for categories like fashion (consumption is irregular and emotional), most durables (one purchase per year or per decade), pure gifting (one-off intent), and brands where the customer experience of choosing each time is part of the value.

All this said, it is possible to get creative with subscriptions, and make them work in non-standard categories. It’s just a lot harder, and requires an audacious vision to get it right.

The offer matters as much as the product

A great product wrapped in the wrong offer can easily fail. In subscriptions, the offer is the bundle of incentives, terms, and flexibility you build around the recurring purchase, and getting it wrong has the same effect as shoehorning a subscription onto a product that’s not the right fit.

Four elements of the offer need to be right:

• Discount depth. Subscribe and save discounts of 10 to 15% are standard. Below 10%, the customer doesn’t feel a meaningful benefit. Above 20%, you’re training customers to subscribe purely for the discount, which inflates churn the moment they hit a payment failure or pause.
• Frequency options. If you sell coffee and only offer monthly, customers who go through it in two weeks or six weeks won’t subscribe. Offer the cadences that match real consumption patterns, not the ones that are easiest to set up.
• Lock-in vs flexibility. Annual prepaid plans look great on paper because they front-load revenue, but they also front-load expectations. Most successful programs lead with month-to-month and let the customer earn their way into annual, not the other way around.
• Free shipping or gifts. Often the deciding factor for the marginal customer. Worth modeling: a free shipping offer can move conversion more than a deeper discount, with less long-term LTV erosion.

A subscription lives or dies on its first 90 days. If the product is wrong or the offer is wrong, no amount of dunning logic or push notifications will save it.

The Real Game Is Churn

Once the product and offer are right, the hard work of running a subscription product begins: keeping people subscribed.

This is where most subscriptions fail. It’s far more common than trying to do subscribe and save for jeans, or getting the initial offer wrong.

The truth is, many ecommerce brands are great at selling. But they’re not great at retention. They assume that subscriptions will handle this automatically, but they don’t.

A successful subscription product requires smart churn management. And that starts with understanding why customers churn.

Here are the different types of churn, and how to build a subscription that performs above average in each of these areas.

Involuntary churn: payment failures

The biggest churn category at most subscription brands isn’t customers leaving on purpose. It’s expired cards, declined transactions, and failed retries that quietly cancel customers who never wanted to leave.

The fix is unglamorous but high-leverage:

• Smart dunning. Multiple retry attempts at staggered intervals, on different days of the week, before any cancellation triggers.
• Card updater. Most major payment processors offer automatic card updates when a customer’s bank issues a new card. Make sure it’s enabled.
• Pre-charge notifications. Email or push the customer two or three days before the charge so they can update payment if needed, instead of finding out after the failure.
• Recovery emails for failed payments. Don’t make the customer log in to fix it. Send a one-click update link.

Brands with strong dunning recover a meaningful share of failed payments that would otherwise be lost. Brands without it cancel customers who would have happily kept subscribing.

Early voluntary churn: didn’t fit

Some customers cancel because the product or experience didn’t match what they expected. They’re hard to keep but easy to identify: they cancel within the first one to two billing cycles.

The levers here aren’t retention tactics, they’re onboarding and expectation-setting:

• Set realistic expectations on the PDP. Don’t promise outcomes you can’t deliver in the first 30 days.
• Front-load value in the first shipment. A welcome bonus, a sample of a complementary product, a personalized note. Whatever signals “we noticed you joined.”
• Onboard the customer to the brand, not only the product. Educational content, founder story, how to get the most out of the first delivery. If the only thing the customer experiences in week one is the box arriving, you’re under-investing.

Fatigue churn: got too much

The customer likes the product but is accumulating it faster than they can use it. They cancel because the cabinet is full and they don’t want another box.

Fatigue churn is the most preventable category and the easiest to leave on the table. The fix is letting customers self-serve flexibility instead of forcing them to cancel:

• Skip a delivery. One-click, no questions asked.
• Pause for X weeks or months. Reactivates automatically.
• Change frequency. Move from monthly to every six weeks. Keeps the relationship alive.
• Swap products. Variety keeps fatigue down on its own.

Brands that hide these options behind support tickets churn customers who would have stayed if they could have clicked “skip.”

Planned churn: life event

The customer’s circumstances changed. They moved, switched diets, had a baby, broke up, retired. Hardest to prevent.

The savable cases get caught in the cancellation flow:

• Offer pause, not only cancel. “Going on vacation? Pause for 4 weeks instead.”
• Offer a frequency change. “Getting too much? Try every 8 weeks at the same discount.”
• Offer a downgrade. Smaller pack size, lower-tier product.
• Offer a discount or free shipping for the next order. Use sparingly: heavy discount-saves train future churn behavior.

A well-designed cancellation flow recovers a meaningful percentage of customers who clicked “cancel.”

Setting Up Subscriptions on Your Store

Strategy is the most important part of a successful subscription product. The right product fit, the right offer, the right churn management strategy.

Once the strategy is right, the implementation has more moving parts than most brands expect. Subscriptions touch the product page, the cart, the checkout, the customer account, and several backend integrations. 

Each surface has decisions that quietly shape conversion and retention. Let’s take a look at how to implement this on your storefront now:

The product page

The product page is where most subscription decisions get made.

• Subscribe vs one-time toggle. Default to subscribe and save selected, with one-time as the alternative. Defaulting to one-time leaves money on the table.
• Frequency selector. Show the cadences that match real consumption patterns. If most customers go through one bag of coffee every three weeks, “every 3 weeks” should be a default option, not buried under “more frequencies.”
• Discount display. Show the savings clearly. “Subscribe and save 15%” with the original price visibly struck out converts better than a single subscription price.
• Trust signals. “Cancel anytime” near the subscribe button is one of the highest-impact micro-copy tweaks for first-time subscribers.
• Build-a-box UI. If you’re doing curated boxes, the PDP becomes a configurator. Make sure the app you pick supports the configurator UX you want, not the one it ships with by default.

Cart and checkout

• Mixed cart handling. Decide whether customers can buy a one-time item alongside a subscription. Most apps support it, but not all checkouts handle it gracefully. Test the experience.
• Subscription summary in the cart. Show what they’re subscribing to, the cadence, the next billing date, and the total. Surprise costs at the next charge are a leading driver of early cancellation.
• Checkout integration. Modern subscription apps integrate with native Shopify Checkout. Older patterns that route through a separate checkout add friction and break Shop Pay flows. Make sure you’re on a current integration.

The customer portal

The customer portal is where retention is won or lost. It’s how customers manage their subscription post-purchase, and a bad one drives churn directly.

A solid portal lets customers:

• Skip the next delivery
• Pause for a defined period
• Change frequency
• Swap or add products
• Change payment method
• Update shipping address
• Reschedule the next charge date
• Cancel (with a flow attached)

Two specific things matter more than they sound. 

Passwordless login is one (most subscription portal traffic comes from email links; making the customer remember a password kills self-service rates). 

The other is a portal that’s branded to match your store. A generic third-party portal signals “this isn’t really your brand,” which subtly undermines trust.

Backend integrations

Subscriptions don’t run alone. A handful of integrations carry most of the weight:

• Email/SMS lifecycle. Subscription-specific flows: welcome, pre-charge reminder, post-shipment, win-back, payment failure, milestone (3 months, 6 months, 1 year).
• Helpdesk. Support agents need visibility into subscription status, upcoming charges, and history. Without it, every support ticket is a fact-finding mission.
• Loyalty and referrals. If you run a loyalty program, subscription orders should still earn points and tier progress. If subscribers don’t accrue rewards, you’re missing one of the easiest retention levers available.
• Reviews. Post-delivery review requests should fire on subscription orders, not only one-time orders.
• Analytics. Most subscription apps have basic dashboards. The brands that scale layer on cohort analysis tools or pipe subscription data into a warehouse for proper LTV modeling.

The integration story matters in app selection. An app with a thinner feature set but deep, tested integrations will often outperform a feature-rich app whose Klaviyo connector breaks under load.

Communications

Actively communicating with your subscription customers is crucial. Don’t make the mistake many brands do, of purposely under-communicating because you’re afraid you’ll “remind customers to cancel”.

Proactive communication reduces churn, it doesn’t create it.

You don’t need to be Hemingway here. Just get the basics right:

• Welcome flow. Sets expectations for the first delivery and the relationship.
• Pre-charge reminder. Two to three days before the charge. Reduces surprise cancellations and gives customers time to skip or update.
• Post-shipment. Tracking, delivery, and a soft prompt to engage with the product.
• Win-back. For canceled subscribers, a sequence over the following 30 to 90 days. Don’t write them off after one cancel.

How Subscription Apps Help You Build a Thriving Subscription Product

Shopify has native subscriptions built into the platform, but the feature set is bare-bones: monthly recurring billing, basic frequency options, and a thin customer portal. 

Most serious subscription brands use a dedicated subscription app for the rest.

A subscription app handles a lot beyond the basics:

• Advanced billing logic (prepaid, pay-as-you-go, hybrid)
• Smart dunning and payment retry
• A real customer portal with skip, pause, swap, and frequency control
• Build-a-box and bundle configurators
• Tiered discounts, gift options, and loyalty integration
• Cancellation flows with retention offers
• Analytics and cohort reporting
• Integrations with the broader stack

A few criteria matter when picking one:

• Dunning quality. Ask what the recovery rate looks like for failed payments. The differences between apps here are bigger than most merchants realize.
• Portal UX. Spin up a test subscription and see what your customers will see. The portal is the retention surface. Don’t pick on screenshots.
• Bundling and build-a-box support. If your offer needs a configurator, make sure the app supports the UI you want, not the one it defaults to.
• Pricing structure. Some apps charge transaction fees on top of monthly pricing. Others are flat. At scale, the fee model usually only beats the flat model at the lowest order volumes.
• Integration depth. Klaviyo, Gorgias, your loyalty app, your reviews app. Check that the integrations exist and are actively maintained, not listed once and abandoned.
• Migration story. If you might switch later (and most brands do), check that the app supports clean export of customer and subscription data.

Here are a few apps worth knowing about:

• Easy Subscriptions is a strong choice for growing brands that want advanced subscription mechanics (build-a-box, prepaid, tiered discounts, upsells) without transaction fees. A good fit when you’ve outgrown the basics but don’t need enterprise scale.
• Utterbond is a Shopify-native app that handles prepaid and pay-as-you-go billing, build-a-box, and dunning at a price point well below the enterprise apps. Often a sensible first move for brands launching their first subscription product.
• ReCharge is the enterprise default. The deepest integration ecosystem, the largest install base among 8- and 9-figure subscription brands, and the most mature dunning and analytics. The trade-off is price (Standard at $99/month, Pro at $499/month) and complexity, neither of which is the right fit for early-stage stores.

The right app depends on the stage of your business (startup vs SMB vs enterprise), and smooth integration with the rest of your store. 

Mobile Apps and Subscriptions

If you’re running a subscription product, you almost certainly need a mobile app as well.

There’s natural synergy between mobile apps and subscriptions. They both excel for products with natural repeat purchase potential, like beauty, supplements or food and beverage. And they’re both built to drive stronger retention and LTV.

Mobile apps also help elevate your subscription product in a number of ways your mobile website, emails and SMS don’t:

• Push notifications are perfect for subscription reminders, order updates, small nudges, because they arrive instantly and are almost guaranteed to be seen.
• The portal is one tap from the home screen. Skipping or pausing a delivery is a 10-second action instead of a hunt through inbox links.
• Win-backs land easier. Email deliverability is fragile; a customer who installed your app gave you a more durable channel.
• App users have higher repeat rates and AOV. That compounds with a subscription’s recurring nature.

The full case for the pairing is in our deep dive on mobile apps for subscription brands, as well as the solution for a common issue that brands face when launching apps – their subscription experience breaking in the app.

How to Build a Winning Subscription Product: Get the Foundations Right

Subscriptions look simple from the outside. But they turn out to be one of the harder products in ecommerce to run well. 

With the enticing nature of recurring subscription revenue comes a lot of competition, higher CACs, and as such, you need strong retention, or you end up losing money.

Luckily, you can get ahead by simply doing what a lot of brands don’t: getting the basics right.

Pick a product that’s a generally good fit for subscriptions. Craft a solid offer. Build the retention system that makes customers want to stay subscribed, making it more painful for them to miss out than to keep getting their orders.

If you want to level your subscription game up even further, launch a mobile app.

Subscriptions are a great business to be in, if you do it right. Just don’t cut corners or see it as a silver bullet. Craft your program the right way, and you’ll be rewarded.

Referral programs are one of the oldest acquisition channels in ecommerce, and one of the most under-used. 

Across DTC, only about 30% of businesses have a formal referral program, despite 83% of customers being open to referring a brand after a successful purchase. That’s a gap you can close with a weekend of work and the right app.

Launching a referral program is such a sound investment – and is becoming more so with AI and LLMs, and the value of people online recommending your brand and your products.

If you’re running a Shopify store and not sure where to start with your referral program, this article answers all of that. We’ll cover the program design decisions first, then the launch steps, then the apps that help you put your program live.

Why Referral Programs Work for Shopify Stores

Referral programs work because people trust their friends more than they trust your ads. The ROI is high, and it’s the kind of channel that actually incentivizes people to talk about your brand.

Here are a few numbers that make the case:

There’s also a cost-curve advantage. Paid acquisition gets more expensive every year as CPMs rise and iOS privacy changes chip away at attribution. Referrals work the other way: the reward only fires after a purchase happens, with no ad spend in front of it, and the channel gets stronger as your customer base grows. More happy customers, more potential advocates.

Referred customers also behave better after they buy. They convert at a higher rate than paid-acquired customers, and they tend to retain better, because they came in on social proof rather than a retargeted Meta ad.

How a Shopify Referral Program Works

Every referral program follows the same loop:

1. A customer (the advocate) makes a purchase or signs up.
2. They get a unique referral link or discount code to share.
3. They share it to friends or followers.
4. The friend clicks through, makes a qualified purchase, and gets their reward automatically.
5. The advocate gets their reward, usually issued as a discount code or store credit.

The reward itself can take several forms:

• Percentage discount. “Give 15%, get 15%.” Most common for apparel and beauty.
• Fixed-amount discount. “Give $10, get $10.” Cleaner math for higher-AOV stores.
• Store credit. Keeps revenue in the store and drives a follow-up purchase. Slightly stickier than a one-off discount.
• Loyalty points. Works best when referrals and loyalty run through the same platform.
• Cash or gift card. Used by brands with very high AOV, or in affiliate-hybrid programs.
• Free product. Strong emotional pull, but requires margin planning.

Where the program lives on your store matters as much as the reward. Common placements include the post-purchase modal, thank-you page, account dashboard, transactional emails, a dedicated /refer landing page, homepage blocks, and SMS campaigns. 

The strongest programs surface in several of these at once. A post-purchase modal alone fires once, and most customers close it without thinking about it again. If the program isn’t also in their email, account page, and the footer, you’ve effectively launched it to nobody.

Types of Referral Programs (and When to Use Each)

Picking the right program structure up front saves a lot of rework later.

Double-sided

Both the advocate and the friend get rewarded. This is the default, and it’s what 78% of brands use. Advocates feel like they’re giving their friends a real benefit, not just doing you a favor.

Use when: You want a program that scales. This is the right starting point for almost every Shopify store.

One-sided

Only one party gets rewarded. Advocate-only works for brands with passionate communities where the friend doesn’t need an incentive (rare). Friend-only works as a pure acquisition play, functionally a “tell a friend” discount.

Use when: You have enough brand pull that one side doesn’t need to be bribed, or you’re running a short-term acquisition campaign.

Tiered or milestone

Rewards escalate based on referral count. First referral gets 10% off, fifth gets $50 credit, tenth gets a free product. Tesla’s original referral program made this format famous.

Use when: You have products with genuine recurring-share potential (supplements, coffee, fashion drops) and a customer base engaged enough to chase a bigger reward.

Ambassador or VIP

A separate, higher-tier program for your top advocates. Often invite-only, with custom rewards, early access, or a revenue share.

Use when: A handful of customers drive a disproportionate share of your referrals, or you’ve got an organic community worth formalizing. Layer this on top of a standard double-sided program.

Affiliate-hybrid

Referral program that pays commission per sale instead of (or in addition to) a store credit. Blurs the line between customer referral and affiliate marketing, which is why most of the best apps handle both.

Use when: You want to activate influencers or creators alongside your customer base without running two separate programs.

How to Design a Referral Program That Drives Real Revenue

Installing and setting up a referral program app takes a weekend. Getting the design of your program right pays back for years.

The decisions below are where most programs succeed or fail. 

Pick the right program type

Default to double-sided unless you have a specific reason not to. Both sides getting something is what 65% of customers prefer, and it gives you the widest audience willing to participate.

Set the advocate reward

The advocate reward is effectively the CAC for the new customer they bring in. Treat it as acquisition cost, not discount margin, and work backwards from there.

Most Shopify brands settle between 10% and 20% off (or $10-$25 in store credit). Below that range, advocates don’t bother sharing. Above it, the acquisition math starts to hurt.

Store credit often outperforms a straight discount on the advocate side. A credit sitting in someone’s account feels like money they need to spend; a percentage-off coupon feels like an optional saving. The return rate is meaningfully higher.

Set the friend reward

This is the bigger conversion lever. The friend has no relationship with your brand yet, so the reward is what gets them to click through and try.

Rule of thumb: make the friend’s reward at least as good as your best first-time-buyer offer. If you’re running “15% off your first order” on your site pop-up, the referral offer should match or beat it. Anything less is worse than your default, and advocates will notice.

Choose the trigger point

When does the reward actually fire? Three options:

• On share. Advocate gets a reward as soon as they send the link. Easy to abuse.
• On friend signup. Advocate gets rewarded when the friend creates an account. Better, but still leaves room for empty accounts.
• On qualified purchase. Advocate gets rewarded only when the friend makes a purchase above a set threshold. This is the standard and every app below defaults to it.

Go with qualified purchase. Layer on a minimum order value ($50+) to cut out low-ticket gaming.

Set your fraud rules

Fraud is the most common reason referral programs underperform. Three non-negotiable rules:

• One-time-use codes per friend. No static, farmable codes that show up on Honey or Coupert. Most apps handle this automatically, but confirm before launch.
• No self-referral. Block cases where the advocate and friend share an email, address, or device fingerprint.
• Rate limits per advocate. Cap the referrals an advocate can earn rewards on per month. Prevents one person turning into a discount factory.

A Reddit thread in r/shopify summed up the issue well: static codes get scraped, end up on discount aggregators, and then anyone can use them. Don’t let your referral program become a permanent promo code.

Plan reward delivery

Automatic beats manual every time. When the qualifying event fires, the reward should appear in the advocate’s email immediately, and ideally auto-apply in their cart if they’re logged in. Manual payout flows introduce delay, which kills the dopamine loop that makes referrals work.

How to Set Up a Referral Program on Shopify (Step-by-Step)

Once you’ve made the design decisions, the setup is fast. Most stores can go live in under a day.

1. Pick a referral app that works with your store, and the type of referral program you want to launch.
2. Install and connect to Shopify. Most apps install in a couple of minutes from the Shopify App Store and auto-detect your products, customers, and order data.
3. Configure rewards. Plug in the advocate and friend rewards you designed above, plus your trigger point, minimum order threshold, and fraud rules.
4. Build advocate touchpoints. Minimum: a post-purchase modal, a transactional email, and a dedicated landing page. Better: an account-page block, plus the referral offer in abandoned cart emails to existing customers.
5. Promote the program. Email your existing customer base at launch (your biggest single pool of potential advocates). Add placements in the footer, homepage, and order confirmation emails. Plan a repeat-promotion cadence, not a one-time blast.
6. Track and iterate. Watch participation rate, friend conversion rate, referred-customer AOV and LTV, and fraud rate. Every 90 days, tune one lever (reward size, placement, messaging) and measure the delta.

Referral Program Best Practices

Here are a few quick tips on launching a referral program that adds to your bottom line:

• Make the reward worth sharing. $5 off a $100 order isn’t worth a text message. Default to percentages your advocates wouldn’t be embarrassed to send.
• Make sharing frictionless. One-click share to SMS, WhatsApp, email, and copy-link at minimum. If an advocate has to log in, generate a code, then manually send it, you’ve lost most of them.
• Surface the program at peak-satisfaction moments. Post-delivery. After a positive review. After a second purchase. These are the moments customers are most likely to refer, and the moments most brands miss.
• Give advocates copy and creative. They’re customers, not marketers. Pre-written SMS and email templates lift share rates noticeably.
• Match reward size to customer value. A VIP customer can unlock a better offer than a first-timer. Segmented rewards feel personal and reduce total reward spend.
• Combine with loyalty where it fits. One program with a referral tier usually beats two disjointed programs competing for the same home-page real estate.

Common Referral Program Mistakes to Avoid

• Hiding the program. One launch email and nothing else. If existing customers don’t see the program in the account page, footer, post-purchase screen, and ongoing emails, most of them will never engage with it.
• Under-incentivizing the friend. Brands spend all their reward budget on the advocate side and leave the friend a coupon worse than the homepage pop-up. The friend is the one converting. Spend there.
• Allowing discount-farm abuse. No one-time codes, no device fingerprinting, no fraud rules. Your referral code ends up on Honey within weeks, and every new customer gets your best discount without ever being referred.
• Not segmenting advocates. Not every customer should be promoted as a brand advocate. Customers who’ve returned products, left one-star reviews, or never repeat-purchased shouldn’t receive “refer a friend” emails.
• Launching without a promotion plan. Installing the app isn’t launching. A real launch includes a dedicated email, SMS sequence, on-site placement, organic social, and a reason-to-refer moment (a product drop, a seasonal push).

How to Choose the Right Referral App for Your Shopify Store

Referral program apps are what make it such a no-brainer to add a referral program to your store.

If you had to build and maintain a custom-built referral program for your store, the ROI would look a whole lot different than it does when there are sophisticated apps out there to help you set it up and run it (often with best practices built in).

Some of the top rated apps in the Shopify App Store include:

(many more available on the App Store too).

To pick the app that fits best for you, look for these things:

• Fit with your store size and budget (some tools are built for enterprise brands, others have entry-level options for smaller stores).
• Integration with other areas of your business (like your loyalty program).
• Support for the program structure you want to implement.
• Design & UI that’s easy to use, fits with your branding and storefront design.

Some key features to look for include:

• Fraud controls built in: one-time-use codes per friend, self-referral blocking by email/address/device, minimum order thresholds, per-advocate caps.
• Surface flexibility: post-purchase modal, account page widget, /refer landing page, transactional email blocks, SMS triggers.
• Reporting that answers “how many sales did this drive last month” without exporting to a spreadsheet.
• Klaviyo or ESP integration for referral follow-up flows.

There’s no one “right” answer for the best app for your store. There are plenty of great options out there. Just find one that fits what you want to do, read the reviews and check out the case studies, and get to launching your program.

All top eCommerce brands today have their own mobile app. An app is an amazing tool to boost customer retention and loyalty, generate more engagement from mobile consumers, and to position your brand as an authority in your industry.

But building an app is hard. Even before you get to the ins and outs of coding an app, you may have no idea where to start in terms of designing a mobile app. That’s why you might be looking for a Shopify mobile app template, to speed up the process.

If you’re looking for a template for your mobile app, we’ve got you covered. In this article we’ll show you where to find Shopify mobile app templates, how to use them, some example templates you can use, and finally explain why you might not need a template in the first place.

What Are Shopify Mobile App Templates & Where to Find Them

A mobile app template can be many things.

In its simplest form, a Shopify mobile app template could be a set of UI design templates for various pages of your app, such as product pages, collection pages, cart page and checkout.

This saves the work of designing a professional and functional interface for your app, and also gives you an idea of which screens or pages you’ll need to build (simple apps may have as few as 3-5 screens, while more complex apps may have as many as 25 or more).

UI templates are useful if you already know what you’re doing when it comes to coding, or you’re passing the designs off to an app developer or app development agency.

But if you’re coding the app in-house, you might require a more in-depth template, that includes starter code for your app.

Code templates essentially give you a shell of an app already built; you just customize it to fit your store, and integrate it with your Shopify admin backend.

In either case, further development is required before you’re able to publish the app for your customers – but a template can give you a head start on the app development process, compared to starting completely from scratch.

Where to Find Shopify Mobile App Templates

You can find Shopify mobile app templates in a number of different places online.

The best place depends on what kind of template you need.

If you’re looking for a basic UI template, check out sites like:

If you’re looking for starter code templates, you can find some options on sites like:

These sites have code you can purchase for a one-off fee (usually quite cheap, somewhere between $30-$150), and thus use for your app.

Alternatively you could look on GitHub, where some developers publish mobile app source code you can take and customize for your own project.

7 Shopify Mobile App Templates to Try (Or Use for Inspiration)

Ready to get a running start on developing your Shopify mobile app? Here are some templates to check out.

Clothing App UI Template

This template on UIzard includes all the necessary pages for a basic clothing app, including:

• Sign up 
• Log in 
• Homepage
• Search 
• Profile 
• Product details 
• Cart
• Customer account and info
• Delivery info
• Checkout, payment and credit card page 

These are only visual designs, and you’ll need to convert them into proper mockups and then again into code. 

UIzard requires a paid subscription ($19 per month, or $12 per month annually) in order to access their templates, which is very minor, all things considered.

You may find this a little basic, but it could provide a good starting point when designing your app’s UI.

eCommerce App UI Kit

This extensive template includes 100 screens, giving a wide variety of options for many different types of page, from login pages, to customer profile pages, wishlist pages, tracking settings and more.

The templates come in Figma/Adobe XD files, which is perfect for passing off to developers, with all the components, vectors and measurements done that developers need to start coding.

You’ll need UI8’s all-access pass to download this template, which is a little costly – $294 per year, or $150 quarterly. But again, considering the overall cost of developing an app, a few hundred dollars for ready-made designs is not too bad.

StoreMax Shopify Mobile eCommerce App Template

This template on CodeCanyon provides starter code for a Shopify mobile app written using Flutter, for just $49.

Push notifications and multiple payment options are set up for you, as well as a number of key pages.

You’ll need to customize it to fit your brand, as well as completing the integration with your Shopify backend. You’ll also need to be proficient in the Flutter app development framework to bring this template to life.

Mstore React Native App Template

Another template on the CodeCanyon marketplace, this template comes with pre-built product detail pages, collection screens, checkout and payment flow, offline wishlist and more, built for React Native.

At $79 for the regular license, it’s an extremely cheap way to get the starter code your developers need to build your mobile app quickly.

Shopify App Template for Node/React

This template comes in the form of a codebase on GitHub.

It utilizes a number of open-source tools, including Node, Express, React and SQL. It’s free – you just need to clone the template and start working on your own version.

Be aware that this doesn’t include visual templates like those above, and instead is more akin to boilerplate or starter code for creating a Shopify app.

You’ll need to design your UI, and then you’ll need to know what you’re doing with a few different development tools and frameworks in order to make use of this.

Shopify Store App Template

This mobile app template comes with UI templates and boilerplate code for building iOS and Android apps with Swift and Kotlin.

It includes more than 50 screens, from product pages to search to signup and OTP pages.

You can get the code on its own to work with separately, or customize it with CodePlatform’s visual builder.

You will need a CodePlatform subscription for this template, which costs $99 per month.

Sellflow Open-Source Shopify Mobile App

This template is another starter codebase on GitHub, built with React Native, TypeScript and Expo.

It comes with a number of comments already built, and all the starter code your app requires.

This is a great resource for anyone looking to build a Shopify mobile app with React Native, with just some simple customization required to turn the template into a real app for your brand.

Why You Probably Don’t Need a Template

The templates we’ve shown you are all useful ways to speed up the development process if you’re designing and building an app from scratch.

However, for most Shopify stores, a template is unnecessary.

Why?

Because your store is the template.

As long as your website is responsive and mobile-optimized, there’s no need to design a brand new UI for your app.

There are some small tweaks you’ll want to make, but ultimately, if your mobile website’s UI is good enough, it will be good enough for your app.

If it’s not, go work on your website first. Build an app-like experience on the web, and then replicate that in your app.

“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. 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.”

-David Cost, Rainbow Shops

Besides, do you really want to use a template for your app?

A template, by definition, means your app will likely look the same as tens, hundreds, or perhaps thousands of other apps.

It’s better to give your customers something that feels unique and personal to your brand, rather than a templated solution that looks like it came off a production line.

Launching a Shopify Mobile App with Vendrux

There’s no need to use any templates, or mess around with customizing templates and finding someone to code them for you, if you simply convert your Shopify store to an app with Vendrux.

Vendrux is a full-service platform that turns any website into native apps. It’s perfect for Shopify stores, because you already have 90% of what you need from an app, in your existing website.

 We add a few small touches, such as native UI and push notifications, and do the coding required to bring your website to life as apps.

You don’t need to code anything, you don’t need to design or rebuild anything, you don’t even need to worry about updates and maintenance after it’s built. We do all that for you.

The apps will reflect everything your website does, including all apps, integrations, custom features, theme alterations and tiny tweaks and optimizations you’ve made to your website to boost conversions.

It’s fully synchronized with your website, meaning you can update your mobile apps at any time, without having to touch any mobile app code.

Vendrux has worked with many high-revenue Shopify merchants, and is a more flexible, more scalable, and ultimately simpler and more affordable option than any template.

Book a demo now to learn more about how we can build the perfect app for your store.

Ready to Build Your App?

Start now, and you could have your own mobile app, live in the app stores, in less than a month.

Shopify merchants are uniquely positioned to launch a mobile app fast, and with minimal expense. Your app just needs to replicate your mobile web experience, which Vendrux does (with the small touches that makes your app feel truly native).

Book a demo now to get a sneak peek of your app, and start the process of building an app that costs next to nothing, adds virtually nothing to your workflow, and takes your brand to another level.