What BigCommerce merchants actually need to know
An app channel for BigCommerce brands, without the storefront rebuild
The question is not whether a mobile app makes sense for your BigCommerce store. It is how to launch one without spending half a million a year on a mobile team, or rebuilding the BigCommerce store you have already invested in.
Push reaches customers where email and search cannot
Email open rates have fallen for years, and the promotions folder eats a large share of what does get delivered. SMS works but carries TCPA-style compliance overhead, costs that scale with volume, and a customer-experience cap before opt-outs climb. For BigCommerce merchants leaning on email and SMS as the only repeat-purchase engines, the retention-channel ceiling sits well below where it used to.
Mobile apps change the shape of the channel. An icon on the home screen, persistent login, push notifications direct to the lock screen, and the install itself as a signal of your best customers. Push reaches the customer where email and SMS cannot, and app users are already opted in by definition.
Across the ecommerce category, app users convert at 3-7x mobile web rates, spend 10-50% more per order, and deliver roughly 3x the lifetime value. The BigCommerce and ecommerce brands MobiLoud has shipped apps for show the same pattern: Pharmazone drives 63% of online revenue through the app, with abandoned cart push converting at 22%. Sleefs ships 3x revenue per user and 30% higher AOV. XCVI drives 4.8x revenue per app user against the same brand's mobile web. Modere shipped a multilingual BigCommerce app during a replatform and put it in the store in weeks, not quarters.
Every other path rebuilds your storefront from scratch
The other routes to a BigCommerce mobile app all ask the same thing: rebuild your storefront in a separate codebase. Custom native (Swift, Kotlin, React Native) means replicating every Storefront API integration your team has wired in, every BigCommerce app with embedded UI, every custom field and B2B Edition workflow, every Stencil theme tweak, and every headless customization on Catalyst, all in a different language and on a different release cycle. The team then carries the duplicated work going forward: every promo, banner, collection, drop, price change, and BigCommerce app addition ships twice.
The cost is real (custom-native runs $500K-$1M+/year fully loaded), but the deeper problem is the duplication itself. You are not paying for a mobile app; you are paying to maintain a second version of your BigCommerce storefront, separate from the first one. DIY wrapper toolkits (Capacitor, Cordova) sit in the same trap on the lighter end: the build is the easy part, the ongoing maintenance is what gets you. If you run BigCommerce headless on Catalyst or a custom frontend, MobiLoud reads from your live frontend like any other storefront.
Your stack stays the source; our team owns the iOS and Android side
MobiLoud is the combination of a native platform and a service team. The platform bridges your live BigCommerce store to an iOS and Android app and brings the features a native app needs built in: push notifications via OneSignal or Klaviyo, deep links into any page, persistent login, native navigation, smart banners, in-app payments, and analytics tied into GA4, Firebase, or Triple Whale. The native integrations you would otherwise build once-per-app are built into the platform once.
Together, your existing BigCommerce store plus our platform is a custom mobile app experience, built on the storefront you already operate, not a second one you rebuild from scratch. Every BigCommerce app, custom field, payment gateway, B2B Edition workflow, Stencil theme tweak, and headless customization that ships on the site shows up in the app automatically.
Your BigCommerce team builds for the app the way they build for the site: Stencil themes, BigDesign components, BigCommerce apps, integrations, headless code on Catalyst, all on the release cycle they already run. Our team guides on the app-specific patterns and applies direct customizations to the app experience when something needs to look or behave differently in the app. The native SDK integrations that come up infrequently (custom payments, native analytics, a POS bridge) we handle from our side, and we run the iOS and Android operational track: builds and submissions under your developer accounts, OS update cycles, certificate renewals, and store policy.
"In a very short amount of time, you got it up, you got it live in the app store."
Modere, on shipping a multilingual BigCommerce app on MobiLoud during their replatform.
After launch is where the channel actually compounds
We are focused on the results we see BigCommerce customers achieve regularly. The launch playbook is where we start: install prompts on your site, smart banners on mobile web, QR codes, email announcements to your existing customer base, and an app-user incentive to drive the first wave of installs. The push strategy gets built into the integration we set up (abandoned cart, back-in-stock, drops, promotional campaigns), all running directly in your existing Klaviyo or OneSignal account.
On Enterprise, the work does not stop at setup. Your customer success manager runs monthly performance checkpoints against peer BigCommerce brands, builds analytics dashboards on the app channel, reviews what is working in the category, and proposes what to try next. The push strategy gets refined as the channel grows.
We have shipped this for BigCommerce merchants like Modere and for ecommerce brands across the category 2,000+ times over. The results above are not exceptional. They are what the channel delivers when it is launched and run properly. The fastest way to know whether it works for your store is the free preview: we build a working version of your BigCommerce mobile app from your live store in roughly 5 to 7 working days, so you can see exactly how it looks and feels before you commit to anything.