How to turn a Shopify Plus store into a mobile app: Pros, cons, and best fit

Most eCommerce traffic now comes from smartphones. Mobile drives more engagement, more revenue, and more attention for almost all online brands.

Yet many aren't making the most of their mobile user experience. Especially for their best customers, those who are most engaged, and want an easier, mobile-native way to engage with the brand.

Shopify Plus merchants like you have put untold hours and an enormous investment into building the ideal web experience. But today, there's one big piece missing for many brands: a mobile app.

Mobile apps are one of the best retention channels available to eCommerce brands. And if you want to accelerate your growth this year, launching your own app is the best way to do it.

Keep reading and we'll elaborate on why your Shopify Plus brand needs an app, why launching the ideal app can be difficult for Shopify Plus brands, and the best options out there to help you go live.

The case for mobile apps is gradually shifting, from something that would be "nice to have" to an essential asset for any serious brand.

Funneling your best customers into your own branded mobile app is one of the strongest ways to improve retention and lifetime value. Which is crucial for profitability, as acquisition gets more expensive.

An app won't replace paid acquisition, but it can help you get more revenue from customers you already earned.

On a mobile site, getting repeat purchases requires re-engaging people through channels like email, SMS, and ads.

In essence, you're often paying to acquire the same customer all over again.

Apps work differently. They're a more direct line to your customers, with push notifications that let you reach out directly to your customers, on their lock screens, for zero cost.

Notifications about sales on the mobile app

The low-cost re-engagement channel, plus built-in loyalty mechanisms of apps means more returning customers, buying at full margins.

That means you keep more of your revenue, and that profit can be reinvested into acquisition.

It becomes a flywheel that can propel your business from 7 figures to 8, or from 8 figures to 9.

On their own, push notifications are reason enough to launch an app. They're direct, instant, and almost guaranteed to be seen, with zero cost per send.

Push notifications are especially useful for time-sensitive, high-intent moments, such as:

• Back-in-stock or new product alerts for your most engaged customers.
• Limited-time promotions when timing matters more than long-form messaging.
• Abandoned cart reminders automatically recover would-be lost revenue.

Push notifications to re-engage with customers

The goal isn't to replace email or SMS. It's to add a channel that can reliably reach customers who opted in to app notifications, especially for short, timely prompts.

The best part is that launching a mobile app doesn't mean a pivot from your existing strategic direction.

You're not launching a mobile app as a vote of no confidence in your website, your email flows or your SMS campaigns. You're not turning off all your paid ads.

The app enhances everything else.

For customers who want to come back and shop regularly, the app makes it easier. Your top 10-20% of customers choose the app as the way they want to shop, the rest keep shopping on your website.

You run all your marketing campaigns as you usually do. You do cross-sells, product recommendations, and all your CRO magic like you usually do.

The difference is a stickier experience for your most engaged customers -- something that can easily add 10-35% in new revenue to your bottom line.

Launching the perfect mobile app can be more of a challenge for Shopify Plus stores, compared to your average Shopify brand.

Shopify Plus stores are rarely "out of the box." You have:

• Custom scripts and checkout logic.
• Third-party apps for loyalty, reviews, search, or personalization
• Bundling, tiered pricing, subscriptions, headless components, or other custom flows.

The core issue is parity. Most app solutions either struggle to replicate the custom elements of your store or charge a premium to do so.

You want a solution that doesn't minimize your site's UX to fit the app. But for ROI's sake, you want something that comes with a manageable cost, upfront and ongoing, both in terms of straight-up financial cost as well as the labor cost for your team.

There's more than one way to build and launch a mobile app. And your choice could make a big impact on the end product and the investment it takes to launch and maintain your app.

Here are the three options available to you (with our recommendation on the best approach for your store).

Custom development means building native iOS and Android apps from scratch, typically via an agency or internal team, then integrating them with Shopify Plus through APIs like the Storefront API and Admin API.

• Unlimited flexibility: If you need highly specialized features (advanced personalization, complex offline behavior, AR experiences, etc.), this approach provides the most freedom.
• Full control: You can optimize every detail of the native UI and performance.

• High cost: Custom development can easily move into five to six figures before you even account for maintenance. For your brand, a production-grade build often starts around $150,000 and can climb far higher depending on scope.
• Long timelines: 6 to 12 months are common for discovery, design, build, QA, and store approvals.
• Ongoing maintenance: You'll maintain separate app codebases alongside your website. Changes to checkout flows, integrations, or tracking often require app updates, too.

Custom development is best when you need an immersive, high-performance app experience, and have the budget (and ongoing engineering capacity) to support continuous improvements and maintenance. For most eCommerce brands (even brands with custom Shopify Plus or headless builds), it's overkill.

DIY app builders are Shopify apps that let you create a mobile app using templates, drag-and-drop blocks and a visual dashboard.

Your product catalog and store details sync with the app, while you configure a unique app layout and UX using the tools the app builder provides for you.

• Faster launch: You can often publish in a matter of weeks (dependent on how long it takes for approval from the app stores).
• Lower upfront investment: A lot cheaper than a custom build. You're usually looking at a cost in the range of $500-$1,000 per month (~$10K per year; which could be less than 10% of what a custom native app would cost).
• UI control: You can customize the front end of your app to create a unique experience for app users fairly easily.

• Template constraints: You're limited to the tool's pre-built UI elements, which can limit brand-specific UX compared to your site.
• Custom feature gaps: If your Plus store relies on custom scripts or specialized storefront functionality, you may need extra integration work (and thus cost) to replicate it in the builder's environment. Or it may not even be possible in the first place.
• Operational overhead: You still need to manage app merchandising, layouts, QA, and ongoing updates. The operational cost of managing a separate app with separate layouts doesn't seem like much, but adds up significantly over time.

DIY builders can make sense for Shopify Plus brands who want to put more effort into customizing their app experience and are comfortable dedicating human resources to managing the app separately from their site.

There's a third category to choose from -- a service that takes the best parts of the app builder approach, together with the best parts of a managed "agency" approach.

MobiLoud is a Shopify mobile app builder that converts your site, instead of rebuilding it. The idea is to keep everything from your site intact; all your custom features, app integrations, meaningful CRO improvements, and build a native mobile app around that.

Turn a website to a mobile app with Mobiloud

The result is an app that does everything you need from a mobile app (push notifications, native navigation UI, a home screen icon), without the pressure of having to rebuild from the ground up in a separate environment. All in a managed service, not a DIY platform.

• Better parity with your existing store: Because the shopping experience is based on your live site, all your storefront customizations and third-party tools carry over without being rebuilt from scratch.
• Simpler ongoing updates: Changes you make to your website can be reflected in the app, reducing the need to maintain separate storefront logic across platforms.
• Faster time to market: Launch speed is more or less on par with DIY app builders (with less work needed from your team).
• Lower total overhead: This approach avoids the "three platforms" problem: web plus separate iOS and Android codebases.

• Less app-specific customization: You can typically still create app-specific pages, discounts, products, etc. But there's less space to build a fully unique app experience, separate from what's shown on your website.

Website-to-app services tend to fit established Shopify Plus brands that are happy with their current mobile site, want the lowest-friction path to an app, and prefer not to rebuild custom storefront logic in a separate codebase. If you want to simply convert your site into a mobile app, with the highest ROI potential, this is for you.

If you're deciding between options, it usually comes down to three factors: budget, time to launch, and how closely the app needs to match your existing Shopify Plus storefront (including custom features and integrations).

Turning a Shopify Plus store into a mobile app is ultimately a tradeoff between flexibility, cost, and operational complexity.

• If you need app-exclusive experiences and have the budget and engineering resources, custom development gives you the most control.
• If you want to craft a more app-native experience and don't mind managing ongoing app merchandising and integrations, DIY builders can be a fit.
• If your mobile site is already performing well and you want an app with minimal rebuild and less maintenance overhead, a website-to-app approach like Mobiloud is often the most practical.

If you're ready to create a high-performance app for your Shopify Plus brand, review the options above, define what you want from your app (and what you don't), and choose the path that best matches that scope and your team's capacity.

Launching an app is a winning move. Choosing the right way to do it just cements the victory.