Category: Blog

Loyalty programs are one of the highest-ROI levers any Shopify brand has. 

The classic Bain study, which has been quoted in publications all over for more than ten years, is still accurate: a 5% increase in customer retention boosts profits by 25-95%. Every percentage point of repeat purchase rate is worth more to your business than a similar uptick in acquisition.

The catch: most Shopify loyalty programs underperform, because they’re just bolted on, without much thought put into the program.

Earn rate too low, redemption rate too low, tiers that don’t motivate, and customers earning points they never spend. The program becomes background noise, and the merchant pays a monthly fee for a feature their customers ignore.

Instead of brushing it off as “we have a loyalty program, because we’re supposed to, but it doesn’t really do anything for us”, first take a look at what you could do to build a better loyalty program – one that does the heavy lifting to bring more repeat customers back to your store.

Why Your Shopify Store Should Have a Loyalty Program

Most businesses look at acquisition as the main driver of growth. But realistically, once you reach a certain level, it’s actually retention that’s driving the bulk of your growth.

Here are three relevant stats to think about:

Loyalty programs drive more repeat purchases and higher retention, which both deliver sales with higher profit margins.

It’s structured for engagement. Birthday rewards, double-point days, tier-up celebrations, and points-expiration nudges are all reasons to email or push someone that aren’t pure promotion. 

Your most valuable customers stay close to your brand without you having to discount your way into their inbox.

There’s a defensive argument too. Once a customer has $40 of points sitting in your store, a competitor needs to win them back from a position where they’re effectively starting at -$40. That’s a switching cost you didn’t have before, paid for at zero direct cost (you only owe the reward when they actually redeem).

Loyalty programs aren’t free. The cost is the redemption itself, plus the app subscription. But of every retention lever available to a Shopify merchant, loyalty is the lowest-effort, most measurable one.

How a Shopify Loyalty Program Works

Your typical Shopify loyalty program has five parts:

1. Enrollment. A customer signs up, usually via a post-purchase prompt, an account creation flow, or an email invite.
2. Earning. They accumulate points (or status, in tiered programs) by taking actions you’ve defined: purchases, reviews, referrals, signups, social follows, birthdays.
3. Reward catalog. A menu of things they can spend points on: discounts, free shipping, exclusive products, early access.
4. Redemption. They cash points in at checkout for a reward, usually as a discount code applied to the order.
5. Tier or status (optional). As they spend more, they unlock higher levels with better perks.

Within these parts, there are a few details that need to be configured. These details depend on how aggressive you want to be with your loyalty strategy.

• Earn rate. How many points per dollar spent. The standard is $1 = 1 point. Some brands run $1 = 5 or $1 = 10 to make the numbers feel bigger.
• Redemption rate. How many points convert to a dollar of value. The typical spread is 100 points = $5, which works out to about $0.05 of redemption per $1 spent. That’s a 5% effective loyalty cost.
• Earning actions. What besides purchases earns points. The good ones expand engagement (reviews, referrals, birthdays). The lazy ones add noise.
• Tier thresholds. What annual or lifetime spend unlocks each level, and what each level unlocks.

We’ll walk through all of these below.

Types of Loyalty Programs (and When to Use Each)

Here are five common ways to structure your loyalty program. Yours may have multiple elements, but it generally falls under one main type.

Points-based

Customers earn points for actions and redeem them for rewards. The default and the most common.

Use when: You have a typical DTC catalog and want a structure customers already recognize from other brands.

Tiered / VIP

Status-based, usually tied to annual or lifetime spend. Each tier unlocks better perks: higher earn rate, free shipping, early access, exclusive products.

Use when: You have a long-tail of high-spending customers who’d respond to status, not just discounts. Common in beauty, apparel, and premium DTC.

Paid membership

Customers pay a fee for instant benefits, such as free shipping, member-only pricing, early access. Amazon Prime, Costco, and a growing list of DTC brands run this format (such as Country Life Natural Foods, with their “Country Life Plus” program).

Use when: Your AOV and purchase frequency support a recurring fee. Strong fit for replenishment categories (supplements, coffee, pet food). Weak fit for low-AOV one-off purchases.

Value-based

Points or rewards tied to a brand value: a portion donated to charity, trees planted per purchase, community access. The reward is alignment, not dollars.

Use when: You have a clear brand mission and a customer base that engages with it. Don’t fake it; customers see through values-washing fast.

Hybrid (loyalty + referral)

Loyalty program with a referral component built in. Customers earn points for referring friends, and the friends get a bonus for joining.

Use when: You’re running both, and you want a single coherent system rather than two programs competing for the same on-site real estate. Most loyalty apps handle referral natively, so this is usually the default rather than a separate decision.

How to Design a Loyalty Program That Drives Repeat Revenue

Adding a loyalty program to your Shopify store is possibly the easiest thing you can do. Just go to the Shopify App Store, find a loyalty app (Joy, Smile, Rivyo, or many others), set it up, and away you go.

Launching a loyalty program that actually delivers results? Now, this is a little more difficult.

Most brands install an app, accept the defaults, and wonder why nobody redeems. Don’t be most brands.

Pick the right program type

Default to points + tiers for most Shopify stores. Points give you a universal mechanic; tiers give your top customers a reason to stay engaged after they’ve redeemed their first reward.

If you’re in a replenishment category (supplements, coffee, pet food), evaluate paid membership against (or alongside) the points program. The math can be substantially better.

Set the earn rate

The earn rate is how many points you give per dollar spent. Three common formats:

• $1 = 1 point. The straightforward standard.
• $1 = 5 or 10 points. Inflates the numbers so they feel substantial. A $50 purchase earns 250 points instead of 50.
• Tiered earn rates. Higher-tier members earn at a faster rate (1.25x, 1.5x).

The actual earn rate doesn’t matter on its own. What matters is what those points are worth at redemption. Pick whichever ratio feels good for the brand and design backwards from the redemption side.

Set the redemption rate

This is the lever that decides what your loyalty program actually costs you. The standard structure is 100 points = $5, with $1 = 1 point — a 5% effective discount on repeat purchases.

Three rules of thumb:

• 5% effective rate is the typical baseline. Most ecommerce loyalty programs sit here.
• 8-10% effective rate is generous and drives faster redemption. Useful for new programs trying to build engagement quickly.
• 3% or below rarely works. Customers do the math, see the points are worthless, and disengage.

Redemption increments matter too. Smaller increments (100 points = $5, 200 = $10) get redeemed faster and create more touchpoints. Large increments (5,000 = $50) feel prestigious but lower engagement. Most stores want the smaller end of the range to keep redemption velocity up.

Choose your earning actions

Beyond purchases, which actions earn points? Each one expands engagement:

• Account creation. Bonus on signup. Drives initial enrollment.
• Reviews. Points per review (with a photo bonus). Amplifies reviews and loyalty in one move.
• Referrals. Points per qualified referred purchase. Loyalty + referral integrated natively.
• Social follows. Points for following on Instagram, TikTok. Modest reward, free distribution.
• Birthday. Bonus points on registered birthday. The cheapest engagement push you can run.
• Newsletter signup. Email or SMS opt-in.
• App download. Extra points for downloading your app (if you have one).

The mistake is including too many. It’s not really a case of letting people earn too many points, but just overcomplicating your program. Six earning actions, each worth 50 points, scattered across the account page is too much noise. 

Pick three or four that map to behaviors you actually want, and weight them so the bonuses feel meaningful.

Set tier thresholds

If you’re running tiers, you need to decide what spend unlocks each level and what each level offers. A workable starting structure:

• Tier 1 (default): 1x earn rate, basic rewards.
• Tier 2 ($250-500 annual spend): 1.25x earn, free shipping, early access to drops.
• Tier 3 ($1,000+ annual spend): 1.5x earn, exclusive products, surprise gifts, dedicated CS.

Two design rules:

• Make Tier 1 generous enough that customers reach it without effort. The point is to get people enrolled. If the entry tier feels too exclusionary or hard to reach, customers won’t engage with anything else.
• Make tier benefits qualitatively different at the top. Higher earn rates work for Tier 2. Tier 3 should offer something money can’t easily buy: early access, exclusive products, dedicated touch.

Decide on an expiration policy

Points usually expire after 12 months of customer inactivity (no purchase, no engagement). Shorter than that feels punitive; longer turns into a balance-sheet problem because every unredeemed point is a future liability.

The smart play: expiration nudge emails 30 days, 14 days, and 7 days out. These are the highest-converting redemption-driven emails most loyalty programs send.

Name your currency

This is small but it matters. “Points” may sound too generic, especially for brands with a unique brand voice. Everything else is custom-tuned to your brand – until the customer reaches the most personal part of the brand-customer relationship.

“Stars” (Starbucks), “Glow Points,” “Drops,” “Coins” are a few examples – anything that ties to the brand. 

The currency is part of your loyalty experience. Spend ten minutes on it.

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

Once you’ve made the design decisions, setup is generally pretty fast and straightforward.

Here’s what the process looks like:

1. Pick a loyalty app that works with your stack, and has a feature set compatible with how you want to set up your program.
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 history.
3. Configure the program. Plug in the earn rate, redemption rate, earning actions, tier thresholds, and expiration policy you designed above.
4. Build customer touchpoints. Account page integration, header bar with points balance, post-purchase modal, transactional email mentions, and a dedicated landing page, like  /rewards.
5. Launch with an enrollment campaign. Email your existing customer base. Give them a one-time bonus for joining (“get 500 points free, on us”). Add prominent placements on the homepage, footer, and post-purchase screen for the first 30 days.
6. Track and iterate. Watch enrollment rate, repeat-purchase rate of members vs. non-members, redemption rate, and time-to-first-redemption. Tune one variable every 90 days and measure the delta.

Best Practices for Successful Shopify Loyalty Programs

Here are some tips to take on board from successful loyalty programs, to increase the chance of yours having the same success.

• Surface the points balance everywhere. Header bar, account page, post-purchase confirmation, transactional emails. If a customer has to log in and click around to find their balance, they won’t.
• Trigger redemption-driven emails. “You have $25 to spend.” Customers respond to the dollar amount, not the point total. These are the highest-converting loyalty emails most programs send.
• Offer status, not just discounts. Free shipping, early access, exclusive products, surprise gifts. Discounts can feel like a commodity, whereas exclusives drive a different kind of emotional lift.
• Run double-point days and seasonal campaigns. A 2x weekend or a member-only Black Friday early-access window creates moments worth caring about.
• Tie loyalty into your email and SMS flows. Klaviyo, Attentive, and Yotpo integrations let you segment members by tier and target them with relevant copy at the right moment.
• Promote enrollment in transactional emails. Order confirmations and shipping notifications get high open rates. Stick a “join the program” link in there.

On top of that, try to avoid the following mistakes:

• Treating points as a pure discount. If your program is “earn points, redeem for $X off,” you’ve built a discount with extra steps. Layer status, exclusivity, and access on top, or members will leave the moment a competitor offers a flat 10% off.
• Hiding tiers. Customers can’t aspire to a tier they can’t see. The current tier and next tier should be visible everywhere – account page, header, transactional emails.
• No redemption push. Customers earn points and forget about them. Without balance-driven emails (“you have $25 to spend”) and expiration nudges, redemption rates collapse and your program quietly dies.
• Launching without an enrollment campaign. “We launched a loyalty program” is not a launch. A real launch is a dedicated email to existing customers with a join bonus, prominent on-site placement for 30 days, and integration into every transactional touchpoint.
• Making points worthless. A 1% effective discount that requires three months of buying. Customers do the math, decide it’s not worth caring about, and disengage. Run the program at a 5% minimum or don’t run it.

Choosing the Right Loyalty App for Your Shopify Store

There are many capable loyalty apps on the Shopify App Store.

Realistically, one app is probably not going to make or break your program (unless you choose a poor-quality app, or one that’s not compatible with the type of program you want to run).

A few popular apps, used by brands we work with, include:

We’d advise you to go and try these apps out for yourself, look at the features they offer, read the reviews.

You’ll find one that seems like a good fit with what you want to do.

Amplifying Your Loyalty Program with a Native App

Here’s one more powerful tip for getting more out of your loyalty program:

Put it in a native app.

Mobile apps and loyalty programs are the perfect combo. Your loyalty program is designed to incentivize customers to shop more and spend more, and your app is designed to make it easy to do the same thing.

Brands that get the most out of their loyalty program also have a mobile app. The app amplifies the loyalty program, and offers extra rewards for app users, which does two things:

• Makes your loyalty program more attractive
• Offers a real incentive for people to use your app, which brings them closer to your brand, and makes them habitual, high-LTV shoppers

You can use push notifications for loyalty updates and redemption offers, and make it super simple for customers to check their balance, redeem rewards, or spend a little bit more to hit their next tier.

“We wanted an app to be in our customers’ pockets, on their phone directly, be able to send push notifications, and be on top of their mind, increase loyalty and retention, to in the end increase revenue.”
— Raphael Faccarello, Head of Ecommerce, Yon-Ka Paris

If you don’t have an app yet, check out Vendrux.

Vendrux turns your existing Shopify store into native iOS and Android apps. It keeps all the features from your site working in the app, including your loyalty program. You don’t need to manage a separate program for the app, or worry about features from the web not carrying over.

Yet you can easily customize your program to provide exclusive offers for app users, and sweeten the deal for your best customers.

It’s the perfect pairing if you want to multiply your LTV – a well-designed loyalty program, running in a Vendrux-powered app.

Ready to Launch?

A loyalty program is one of the highest-ROI levers a Shopify store has, once it has repeat customers. Design the program first: earn rate, redemption rate, tier thresholds, earning actions, expiration policy. Pick the app that matches your size and stack. Launch with a real enrollment campaign, not a single email.

And if you want your program to run where your highest-LTV customers actually spend their time, put it inside a mobile app. Vendrux turns your existing Shopify store into native iOS and Android apps, with your loyalty program, push notifications, and tier-up alerts built in.

Get a free consultation to see what your mobile app could look like, and how it could amplify the loyalty program you’re about to launch. No commitment required. If the math doesn’t work for your brand, we’ll tell you.

Chatbots aren’t new – online brands have been putting conversational chatbots on their site for years now. But with AI, the ability of these tools is going up, and they’re becoming an indispensable tool for ecommerce brands.

You can become over-reliant on chatbots, though, or implement them in a way that either contributes no value, or worse, actively takes away from your customer experience.

This guide will walk you through doing it the right way, and building chatbots that drive revenue and decrease the workload for your team, without over-automating and driving customers away.

Want the latest insights into how 7, 8 and 9-figure brands are driving sustainable growth? That’s what you get with our weekly newsletter, The Retention Edge. Subscribe for free today.

What a Shopify Chatbot Is (and What It Isn’t)

A chatbot is an automated conversation surface on your store. A customer types a question, the bot answers, and the conversation either resolves there or escalates to a human.

There are four jobs a Shopify chatbot is good at:

• Pre-sale product Q&A. Sizing, fit, compatibility, “is this in stock,” “does it work with X.” The questions that block a purchase but don’t need a human.
• Cart recovery. When a customer hesitates at the cart or checkout, a well-timed chat prompt can answer their last question and get the order through.
• Post-purchase support. Order status, shipping ETAs, returns initiation, “where is my package.” The single biggest source of repetitive support tickets in ecommerce.
• Tier-1 customer support deflection. FAQ-style questions that have a documented answer somewhere on your site. The bot serves the answer instantly; the customer doesn’t email and wait.

It’s worth distinguishing a chatbot from live chat, because the two tend to get used interchangeably:

• Live chat is a human typing answers in real time.
• A chatbot is automation answering on its own.

Modern Shopify apps usually offer both in the same widget, with the bot handling tier-1 and a human picking up when the bot escalates.

Both are powerful tools for your store. While chatbots are more about automating support tickets or questions, live chat, including WhatsApp/chat apps, are great for higher-touch conversations.

(WhatsApp marketing is especially effective for stores with international customers, where email open rates tend to be lower and WhatsApp is the default communication channel.)

Why Your Shopify Store Should Use a Chatbot

In short: a chatbot can be a great way to deal with repetitive support questions, and provide instant information to customers, without having to pay staff to sit at a computer 24/7.

It can also be a sneakily powerful revenue driver and a great tool for collecting first-party customer data.

Let’s dive deeper. Here are the top five reasons to use a chatbot on your Shopify store.

Tier-1 support deflection

Gorgias, Tidio, and Re:amaze all report their automation customers regularly deflect 30-50% of routine support tickets through bot resolution. 

The exact number depends on how broadly you train the bot and how cleanly your existing FAQ and order data feed it, but a third of your tickets going away is the floor for most stores that bother to set the bot up properly.

It’s not about reducing headcount in your support team, necessarily. It’s about making your existing team more focused, and freeing them up to put more effort towards the conversations that actually need them.

24/7 availability without staffing

Most ecommerce shopping happens outside business hours. The customer asking “does this run small?” at 11pm isn’t going to wait until 9am the next morning to find out. They’ll bounce, or buy a competitor’s version that answers the question on the spot.

A chatbot covers those hours at basically zero marginal cost. The bot doesn’t sleep, doesn’t take holidays, doesn’t call in sick or show up hungover, and doesn’t add to payroll.

Faster responses

Research finds that that buyer-vendor response times under five minutes correlate with substantially higher conversions than hour-plus responses. 

For ecommerce specifically, the window is tighter still: most product-page questions that delay a purchase get abandoned within minutes if no answer arrives.

A chatbot collapses that window to seconds. Even imperfect answers beat no answer arriving.

Cart recovery intervention

Average ecommerce cart abandonment sits around 70%. A meaningful chunk of that is friction the customer can’t resolve in the moment – a sizing doubt, a shipping question, a coupon issue.

A well-scoped chat prompt at the cart or checkout (offering to answer questions, surfacing recent reviews, applying a recovery code) reframes the abandonment moment. Cart recovery on top of email recovery flows is one of the highest-ROI surfaces a chatbot can run.

First-party data and intent capture

Every conversation is owned, structured first-party data. Customer questions tell you what’s confusing on your product pages, which sizes are missing from your size guide, which products customers can’t find, which policies aren’t clear.

That’s a continuous feedback loop most Shopify stores don’t have. The bot pays for itself on the support deflection alone, and the data is a bonus that compounds over time.

Where Your Chatbot Does Its Work

There are various steps of the customer journey where a chatbot delivers value. At each step, customers are asking different questions, they’re at different parts of your site, and there are different objectives for your chatbot.

Pre-purchase

The customer is researching. Common questions include: “what size am I,” “does this work with X,” “is this in stock,” “how long until it ships.” These questions block the purchase if unanswered, and they’re the highest-leverage place to deploy a bot because the answer often unlocks the order directly.

Cart and checkout

The customer is committing. The bot’s job here is friction reduction, not selling. Your chatbot is surfacing recent reviews, answering a sizing concern, offering a shipping calculator, validating a discount code that’s not working.

The risk is interruption. You want to provide value, but it’s crucial that you don’t get in the way of customers who are otherwise ready to buy.

A pop-up that hides the checkout button kills conversions faster than the bot can recover them. Slide-in or low-friction surfaces work; full-screen modals don’t.

Post-purchase

Where the highest-volume support questions live. Order status, shipping updates, returns initiation, “I bought the wrong size.” Most of these have documented answers in your store data. A chatbot connected to your order system can resolve them without a ticket ever opening.

This is also where your support team is most likely to be drowning, which makes it the highest-ROI place to deploy a bot.

Customer support and FAQ

The catch-all. The bot fields tier-1 questions across the site, escalates to a human when it hits something it can’t handle, and routes the conversation to the right helpdesk inbox.

What’s important to remember, though, is that the bot should never get in the way of reaching a human. Automating basic tickets is fine, but it should be simple to elevate this to a real support staff.

AI vs Rule-Based Chatbots

This is the biggest evolution in chatbots right now. For years, chatbots have just been simple rule-based programs. Yet now, with the evolution of AI, chatbots are becoming increasingly intelligent, and are often able to veer off script, potentially covering a greater range of queries.

Here are the different kinds of chatbots, and how they work, from a practical point of view.

Rule-based chatbots

The customer follows a scripted conversation tree. “Are you asking about an order, a return, or a product?” with branching responses based on what they pick.

• Strengths: predictable, fast, cheap, never says anything off-brand. Excellent for high-volume, well-defined jobs (order status, return initiation, FAQ).
• Weaknesses: rigid. Anything off-script returns “I don’t understand” or hands off to a human, which can frustrate customers who expected a smarter bot.

AI / LLM-based chatbots

The bot understands natural language and answers based on training data (your product catalog, FAQs, policies, support history). The customer types whatever they want; the bot interprets and responds.

• Strengths: better customer UX, handles open-ended questions, can answer product questions across your entire catalog.
• Weaknesses: harder to control, can hallucinate if trained on bad data, more expensive, slower to deploy. Needs guardrails (you don’t want it inventing return policies).

Hybrid (most modern apps)

Rule-based flows for the predictable jobs; AI layered on top for the open-ended Q&A. This is what apps like Tidio, Gorgias Automate, Ada, Zowie, and Re:amaze ship with by default.

For most Shopify stores, the best approach is a hybrid chatbot. Start with rule-based flows for the highest-volume jobs (order status, returns, sizing), then layer AI on top once those are running cleanly. Don’t lead with AI; it’s harder to debug when it goes wrong.

What Separates a Good Chatbot from a Bad One

A well constructed chatbot is a meaningful value-add for your business. A bad one can be seriously damaging for your customer relationships.

Do a quick check before you put your chatbot live, and make sure it falls into the first camp.

Here are some of the hallmarks of good and bad Shopify chatbots:

Good chatbots:

• Scoped to specific jobs the bot is actually good at
• Sub-2-second responses
• One-click handoff to a human, no friction
• Brand-consistent voice
• Knows when to stop (doesn’t try to answer questions outside its scope)
• Trained on your real data (catalog, policies, ticket history)

Bad chatbots:

• Aggressive pop-ups that interrupt browsing
• “I didn’t quite get that” loops with no obvious exit
• Burying the human-handoff button three menus deep
• Generic AI voice that doesn’t match the brand
• Trained on someone else’s FAQ data because nobody set it up properly
• Trying to sell when the customer asked a support question

Just make sure your chatbot isn’t annoying to use, doesn’t sound like an automated telemarketer, and isn’t intrusive for people who don’t need it.

How to Set Up a Chatbot on Your Shopify Store

One of the best things about being on Shopify is that the “how to” for adding just about any feature to your site is the easiest part.

The ecosystem of tools you have to work with is extremely deep, and setup is generally easy for anyone to do.

First, decide what you want the chatbot to do – why you’re adding it, what features you need, how it fits into your customer journey.

Second, choose an app. Here are some popular examples:

• YourGPT is a leading AI-first platform that provides a complete system for automating customer support, sales, and internal operations. 
• Tidio provides a comprehensive customer experience platform with live chat for proactive selling, an AI chatbot (Lyro) for automatic question resolution, and customer interaction tools like cart preview, order history, and product recommendations in chat. 
• Gorgias is one of the most widely used tools in the Shopify world, and gives you a clean chatbot/helpdesk integration.
• Re:amaze is another helpdesk tool with AI chat (as well as live chat) built in.

Check out a few tools, see which one(s) fit with what you want to do, and what your existing stack looks like.

After setting up your chatbot, make sure you continually monitor it. Track deflection rate (% of conversations resolved without a human), CSAT score after bot conversations, cart recovery conversion rate, and time-to-first-response. 

Keep tuning it, especially during the first 90 days after installing it. You’ll likely need to prune and adjust it over time, to ensure customers keep getting helpful results.

One Step Further: Why Chatbots Work Even Better in a Native Mobile App

A chatbot on the web lives in a floating widget that disappears the moment the customer closes the tab. Half its work gets stranded on a surface customers don’t keep open.

In a native mobile app, the same chatbot does more.

If you’ve built a great chatbot, that just increases the benefit of extending your customer experience to a native app. Here’s why:

Push notifications turn the bot into a proactive channel

A customer who started a chat earlier and bounced can be re-engaged with a push: “your sizing question, here’s what we’d recommend.” Email opens are inconsistent; push reach is near-universal. The bot becomes a two-way channel rather than a passive widget.

In-app conversations persist

A chat that started on Tuesday is still there on Thursday with full context. The customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves. The bot has more history to work with. Your helpdesk doesn’t lose continuity when a tab closes.

Native chat UX beats a floating browser widget

Native message threads feel like the messaging apps customers already use – WhatsApp, iMessage, Messenger. Tap to open, swipe to dismiss, notifications inline. A floating widget on a mobile browser is small, easy to miss, and competes with the URL bar for attention.

Your highest-LTV customers live in the app

App users buy more often, spend more per visit, and retain longer. Your most engaged audience is sitting inside the app, not on mobile web – and they’re the ones the chatbot can do the most for.

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Looking for the best way to extend your web experience into a native app?

Vendrux turns your existing Shopify store into native iOS and Android apps with full feature parity with your site. The chatbot you’ve installed on your site works in the app the same way it works on the web, with push notifications and a home-screen icon layered on top.

Want to see what’s possible? Get a free preview of your mobile app now.

Ready to Add a Chatbot?

A chatbot isn’t going to replace your support team, your product pages, or your customer relationships. It’s not supposed to. The job is to handle the 30-50% of customer interactions that are repetitive and predictable, fast, so the rest of your business can focus on what isn’t.

Pick the jobs first. Pick the type (rule-based, AI, or hybrid) that matches the jobs. Pick an app that does both well. Test it before you ship it.

And if you want the chatbot working where your most engaged customers actually shop, put it inside a native mobile app. Get a free consultation to see what your Shopify store could look like as a native app, and how a chatbot fits inside it. No commitment – if it doesn’t make sense for your brand, we’ll tell you.

If you’re exploring a mobile app for your Shopify store, you’ll find there are two ways brands typically do this: custom app development, or no-code Shopify app builders.

Both approaches use the Shopify Storefront API to pull data from your store and display it inside the app. Product titles, images, prices, collections, cart functionality, and checkout all flows through the API. 

The app is essentially a separate frontend that queries Shopify’s backend for data, then renders it in its own interface.

While the API-driven approach might seem like it makes the most sense for your app, it actually comes with some notable downsides. We’ll explore this and more below.

What is the Shopify Storefront API & How Does It Work?

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s essentially a piece of code that lets software applications communicate with each other and share data, and is commonly used for websites or apps to get data from an external tool or server.

Shopify provides a number of APIs that allow third-party developers to create software applications for Shopify stores, or for Shopify businesses to extend the capabilities of their own store.

Most relevant if you’re building a mobile app for a Shopify store is the Storefront API – a GraphQL API designed for customer-facing experiences. It handles:

• Product data – titles, descriptions, images, variants, pricing
• Collections – product groupings and basic sort orders
• Cart and checkout – creating carts, adding items, initiating checkout
• Customer accounts – login, order history, saved addresses
• Search – basic product search queries

In basic terms, it’s what allows your mobile app to run share data with your web storefront.

To use it, you generate access credentials through a custom app in Shopify Admin, configure API scopes (what data the app can access), and retrieve a Storefront API access token. The API works with iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, and any language that can make HTTP requests.

‍Shopify’s documentation has instructions on how to generate API credentials. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Start by creating a custom app in the Settings section of your Shopify Admin panel.
• Now configure your API access scopes (what the API can do – such as read and modify checkouts, read content, read and modify customer details).
• Install the app.
• Go to “API credentials”, where you’ll see your Storefront API access token, which you’ll use in your application.

Build a Mobile App with the Shopify API (Why It’s Not Always Optimal)

If you’re building a custom mobile app (an app built from scratch, with a framework like React Native, Flutter, or native Swift/Kotlin builds), or you’re using a Shopify app (one of the dozens of mobile app builders in the Shopify App Store), you’re likely using the Storefront API.

Let’s look briefly at each option now, followed by the pros and cons of using the Shopify API to build an app.

Custom Development

Building a custom app means using mobile programming languages or frameworks to create a native mobile app, and using the API to link this app with your Shopify store.

Popular frameworks and languages for eCommerce apps include:

• Swift (for iOS only)
• Java/Kotlin (for Android)
• React Native (cross-platform)
• Flutter (cross-platform)

If you want to build a custom app, you’ll need a team of developers. You could bring them in on a permanent basis, hire freelancers, or contract an agency to supply the developers to build your app.

Custom development allows the most flexibility when building an app, but it’s also extremely expensive, time-consuming and complicated.

You’ll not only need to build a mobile UI from scratch, but build custom integrations for any Shopify apps or tools you use on your site.

Expect this to cost $50,000 minimum – not including ongoing maintenance after you launch, which can easily by 5 or 6 figures per year.

Shopify App Builders

The other option is to use a Shopify app builder, which is a no-code tool that’s already integrated with the Shopify API.

These tools let you build a mobile app yourself, without coding or hiring developers, with pre-built templates and a drag-and-drop builder.

App builders are more convenient and much cheaper than building custom apps from scratch, and are more likely to work within the budget and capabilities of small or medium-sized eCommerce businesses.

However, they’re also very limiting, and you may find it difficult to create the ideal app for your store. Many of these limits are due to the Shopify API itself, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next section.

Learn more about the pros and cons of DIY app builders here.

Pros and Cons of the Shopify API

There are definitely a lot of good things about Shopify’s APIs and the tools they give developers. But in our opinion, there is also some downside to it.

Here’s a closer look at the pros and cons.

Pros

• Stable, well-constructed with good documentation.
• Works with a variety of programming languages and frameworks.
• Scalable, with a high level of security and no rate limits.
• A convenient way to integrate the basic necessities of your store in a mobile app.

Cons

• Building custom mobile apps with the API requires a high level of technical expertise.
• There are limits to what the API allows you to do; syncing things like order details and simple product information is easy, but more precise features (such as complex collections, sort orders and checkout flows) are limited with the API.
• Some apps or plugins aren’t supported by the API.
• The API won’t support any custom features you’ve built on your Shopify store.

Rainbow Shops ran into issues with their app, which was built with an API-based app builder, as their VP of eCommerce and Marketing, David Cost, says:

“The Shopify API only enables certain things and all the major providers of apps for Shopify had limitations that the Shopify API would not let them get around.”

Rainbow had problems integrating the extensive optimizations they had made with collections and product variations in their app, due to the limitations of the API. These changes had proven to make a significant impact on conversions on the website, so it put a cap on the potential of their mobile app.

A Better Option: Convert Your Store to Mobile Apps with Vendrux

The solution for those who want to build an app for their Shopify store, that syncs with their website, but doesn’t have the constraints and limitations of the Shopify API, is to convert the site to apps with Vendrux.

Vendrux is a managed service that converts websites into mobile apps. The apps look and feel just as good as custom mobile apps, and are fully synchronized with your website, but without relying on any APIs.

We reuse most of what is already on your website – the same design, product information, apps and integrations – and mix it with native features to give a proper native look and feel to your mobile apps.

This offers a lot more flexibility and fewer limitations, without the headache and expense of hiring developers.

More than 2,000 businesses have used our service to create their mobile apps, including many high-revenue Shopify stores (check out some examples here).

To get an idea of how Vendrux works, book a demo and get a free preview of your app now.

What Makes Vendrux a Better Option?

Vendrux is ideal for eCommerce businesses, because your app doesn’t need to do anything significantly different to your website.

If you have a well-optimized and responsive mobile website, you’re 90% of the way to having a great-looking mobile app. All that’s needed are some small UI tweaks, and integration with native mobile push notifications.

Custom development is overkill for Shopify sites, while app builders limit you too much.

Here’s more reasons why Vendrux is the best way for Shopify stores to launch a mobile app:

• We convert everything from your website into the app, including all apps and integrations and custom features.
• No integration limits or hidden fees to use specific Shopify apps (e.g. Klaviyo, Yotpo, etc) in your mobile app.
• It’s fully managed – virtually nothing for you or your team to do.
• Fast and affordable – launch in less than a month, for a minimal investment.
• There’s no rebuilding required, and all your website features work seamlessly, out of the box.
• Your app updates as your site does – no difficulties or inefficiencies trying to stay consistent across app and website.
• There’s minimal overhead, as you don’t need to manage the app separately.
• Unlimited push notifications are included and built in, using leading push provider OneSignal.
• App maintenance and updates are included.
• App store submission is done for you.

How to Build a Shopify App with Vendrux

With Vendrux, you can launch an app for your Shopify store in three simple steps:

1. Book a demo and get a preview of your app – it’s free, with no obligation, and you can get answers to any questions you have about how Vendrux works.
2. Share any special requirements you have for the app, then pass it off to our team.
3. Leave it to us. We’ll build your app, test it (you’ll have the ability to test and give feedback too), and finally submit it to the app stores for publishing. In essence, we handle everything app-related. You just keep managing your website and business like normal.

It’s really that simple. It costs a tiny percentage of what a custom app does, yet the end result is indistinguishable from the kind of app some brands pay millions of dollars for.

Book your free preview now and start building your hassle-free Shopify mobile app, with no limitations and no risk.