Why Your Ecommerce Store Needs a Mobile App

Your ecommerce store already works on phones. You have a mobile-friendly website, your customers browse it all day, and mobile feels handled. Yet every time a past customer comes back, they have to remember your brand, search for it, type your URL, or click an ad or an email.

This means that every return trip to your site depends on someone else. You’re paying them money, or praying to the algorithm gods, that your customers will be able to find you again.

The brands closing that gap have an app. An icon on the customer's home screen, notifications on their lock screen, and a direct route back that doesn't pass through anyone else's platform. 

For years, ecommerce people have looked at apps as a channel that wouldn’t move the needle much without huge adoption, or a six-figure project that regular brands couldn’t afford. Both assumptions deserve a second look. 

Here are seven reasons your store needs an app, and when an app makes the most sense to build.

1. Most of Your Customers Already Shop on Their Phones

The phone is now where most online shopping happens, so it's where your store most needs to perform.

According to Contentsquare's 2026 benchmarks, drawn from 99 billion sessions across more than 6,000 sites, mobile accounts for about 70% of website traffic. Adobe found that mobile drove 56.4% of US online holiday spending in 2025, up from 54.5% the year before.

The most telling thing here might be the gap; with 70% of traffic and 55% of revenue, there’s clearly room for mobile commerce spending to grow even further.

Mobile is the dominant surface for ecommerce, and it’s only going to keep going that way; making the case for mobile-first channels like an app.

2. A Mobile Website Can Only Take You So Far

A mobile-friendly website makes your store work on a phone, but it’s not the optimal channel to make the most of your mobile shoppers.

There's a conversion gap between mobile web and mobile apps. The same Contentsquare benchmarks mentioned above show desktop still converts 74% better than mobile. 

But the more pressing issue is that it’s temporary. It’s not built for retention. For a customer who wants to come back again and again, a mobile website isn’t the ideal experience.

They need something built for mobile, and with less friction to come back.

3. An App Puts Your Store on the Home Screen

An app gives your store a permanent spot on your customer's phone, one tap from the next order.

Once someone installs your app, there's no searching, no typing, no ad standing between you and a returning customer. They tap the icon and they're in your store. Customers stay signed in, so getting back to their cart takes seconds rather than a login and a search.

There's a quieter benefit as well. Your icon sits on the home screen every time they unlock their phone, which the average customer does dozens of times a day. No email open rate can compete with that kind of passive visibility. 

Businesses spend millions of dollars on billboards and TV spots to build brand awareness. Your app gives you an always-on reminder of your brand, in the place your customers look at sometimes hundreds of times a day.

4. Push Notifications Reach Customers Directly

Apps give you another powerful channel all in itself: push notifications.

Push notifications land on the lock screen, so your message reaches customers without fighting through a crowded inbox.

It’s not that email doesn’t work; it does. But open rates are slipping, and even for the highest performers, each email has less than a 50% chance of being seen.

A push notification is almost guaranteed to be seen. It’s difficult to ignore. And with the low level of friction (one tap, you’re in the app), it’s a powerful way to get people back into your store and viewing your products.

Take a hypothetical skincare brand whose customers reorder every six weeks. With email, that brand sends a reminder and hopes it gets opened before the customer runs out. With an app, the reminder lands on the lock screen at the right moment, one tap from the reorder. 

The message might be the same. But you’re putting it somewhere it’s much more likely to be seen (and acted on).

5. App Users Buy More Often and Spend More

Customers who use your app become more valuable customers.

A peer-reviewed study of a retailer's app launch found that customers who adopted the app bought 33% more often and spent 37% more than those who didn't.

The reason isn't mysterious. The app removes friction for people who already like your brand: signed-in sessions, a saved cart, one tap from the home screen. And it gives you a place to reward those customers: app-only offers, early access to launches, a loyalty program front and center rather than buried in an email footer.

Your best customers get a better experience, and you get customers who buy more often. That's the flywheel an app creates.

6. You Don't Need Every Customer to Download It

One common objection to launching an app is the notion that this means you expect the majority of your customers to download it.

“Nobody downloads apps.” “Downloading an app is too much work, no one’s going to do it.”

Most of your visitors will still come on the mobile web. But just a small share of your customers getting the app will make it worth having.

These are your best customers; the ones who are most valuable to have close to your brand. And the ones who contribute the most.

The numbers back this up. In MobiLoud’s Ecommerce Mobile App Benchmark Report, brands studied averaged around 5 to 10% of their overall customer base using the app. Those customers contributed 20-35% of these brands’ total online revenue.

In one standout case, a Pharmacy brand sees 65% of their total online revenue from just 16% of their customers.

Small share of your audience. Outsized share of revenue.

7. An App Is No Longer a Six-Figure Project

The other common misconception regarding mobile apps (and honestly the reason most brands haven’t considered this as an option) is the idea that it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of development effort to build an app.

It used to. Not anymore.

No-code tools, AI-driven platforms and other app builder services exist now that can get you a real, full-featured app for a cost that makes sense for any successful ecommerce brand.

MobiLoud, for example, builds mobile apps for ecommerce stores by turning the brand’s existing website into an app, instead of rebuilding everything from scratch (as used to be the convention).

This kind of workflow means your app could cost a few thousand per month, instead of $100K+ per year.

It’s still not a cost-free project. But for brands at a certain scale, when you could be doing five-six figures in monthly revenue through your app, the cost it takes now is truly negligible.

When an App Makes the Most Sense

Some stores are a better fit for an app than others.

An app makes the most sense for stores with loyal, repeat customers and mostly mobile traffic. 

If your customers typically shop on desktop, they may be slow to adopt an app. And if your customers tend not to come back very often, they may not see the need to download your app.

But for the likes of:

• Replenishment products (beauty, supplements, pet food, coffee)
• Brands that run drops, launches or frequent promotions
• Brands with a loyalty program or VIP tier

It’s a no-brainer.

And you need the scale to justify an app, based on projections of it generating 10-20% of your overall revenue. That generally means it should be a serious consideration for any brand doing around $2M or more in annual sales.

The Bottom Line

Ecommerce today is not just ecommerce. It’s phone-dominant mobile commerce. Your customers are likely shopping from all their favorite brands via their phones. And many are doing it on a surface that’s not ideal for mobile browsing.

An app is ideal. It’s the best way to shop online.

Offering your best customers an app will give them the user experience they need to keep coming back, over and over again. It’ll give you valuable awareness on your customers’ favorite piece of hardware, and a revenue channel that could be the easiest way to add six or seven figures in new revenue to your business, just by getting your existing customers to come back and shop with you more often.