What teams running custom ecommerce sites actually need to know
An app channel for custom ecommerce sites, without the storefront rebuild
The question is not whether a mobile app makes sense for your custom ecommerce site. It is how to launch one without rebuilding the storefront your team has spent years building.
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. The retention-channel ceiling for ecommerce brands running custom sites 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. John Varvatos, on a custom Salesforce Commerce Cloud stack, generates 10x revenue per app user vs mobile web. Tadashi Shoji, on a custom Magento build, drives 18% of online revenue through the app. PetShop.co.uk, on an Oracle NetSuite SuiteCommerce stack, hit 10% of revenue from the app in the first month. JF Petroleum, on a WooCommerce-on-Laravel stack, runs a B2B variant of the same channel. The pattern holds across teams that have already done the work of getting catalog, pricing, and checkout right on the web.
Every other path rebuilds your storefront from scratch
The other routes to a mobile app for a custom ecommerce site all ask the same thing: rebuild your storefront in a separate codebase. Custom native (Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Flutter) means replicating every API call, every server-rendered page, every business rule, every checkout flow, and every custom module your team has shipped, in a different language and on a different release cycle. The team then carries the duplicated work going forward: every promo, banner, drop, price change, and integration update ships twice.
The cost is real (custom-native runs $500K-$1M+/year fully loaded for an enterprise-scale custom build), but the deeper problem is the duplication itself. Your team built a custom site because off-the-shelf platforms could not meet your requirements. A custom native build gives that custom investment up on the mobile side, paying to maintain a second storefront separate from the first.
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 custom ecommerce site to an iOS and Android app and brings the features a native app needs built in: push notifications via Klaviyo or OneSignal, 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 a custom build would assemble once per app are built into the platform once.
Together, your existing custom site plus our platform is a custom mobile app experience, built on the storefront you already operate, not a second one your team rebuilds from scratch. Every server-rendered page, every API call, every custom checkout flow, every server-side integration, and every in-house module that ships on the web shows up in the app the same day.
Your engineers build for the app the way they build for the site: Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Java, Go, or whatever stack your custom build runs on, on the release cycle they already use. 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 payment processors, attribution tools, a POS bridge, niche analytics) we handle from our side. We run the iOS and Android operational track: builds and submissions under your developer accounts, OS update cycles, certificate renewals, and store policy. John Varvatos, Tadashi Shoji, Jack & Jones, Junior Couture, and PetShop.co.uk all run on this combination.
"We had a code-based app, not showing the website but using data from an API endpoint, and we didn't want to do that anymore. 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 MobiLoud could."
Svend Hansen, Product Owner at BESTSELLER, on consolidating Jack & Jones from three native codebases to a MobiLoud app built on their custom stack.
After launch is where the channel actually compounds
We work alongside your team to deliver the results we see ecommerce 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, in-store signage where relevant, 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 continues past setup. Your customer success manager runs monthly performance checkpoints against peer ecommerce brands, builds analytics dashboards on the app channel, reviews what is working in the category, and proposes what to try next. Included monthly development time covers app-side tweaks, custom platform integrations, and direct support for your engineering team when something needs an app-side fix. The push strategy gets refined as the channel grows.
MobiLoud has served 2,000+ brands. 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 custom ecommerce site is the free preview: we build a working iOS and Android app from your live site in roughly 5 to 7 working days, so you can see exactly how it looks and feels before you commit to anything.