What Ecommerce Startups Get Wrong About Mobile Apps 

For years, “mobile-first” was about making sure a website functioned well on a smaller screen. Most ecommerce startups did that work, and most did it reasonably well, too. Phones now account to the bulk of online shopping traffic, so a truly clunky mobile site has become rare.

The harder question is what comes next. A mobile website is where people land, but a shopping app is something a customer chooses to keep on their phone. That’s the small decision that changes the economics of the relationship: shopping apps tend to convert better than mobile browsers and see far less cart abandonment, but many young brands still treat the app as an optional extra, or as one more place to sell. 

Atul Poharkar, CEO of app-building platform AppMaker works with hundreds of ecommerce brands on this problem. “Mobile apps are moving from sales channels to experience and retention centers,” he told The Startup Magazine.

The brands pulling ahead have caught on to that shift, and in his view, a lot of startups are still spending money in the wrong places trying to get there. 

Personalization has become part of the product 

Over the past year, the biggest change Poharkar has noticed is a move away from standard storefronts toward dynamic ones: around 30% to 40% of the new brands coming to his company ask for homepages and product listing pages that change depending on who the customer is, what they have browsed and what they have bought before.

“We’re seeing brands invest more in personalization because the experience itself is becoming a growth lever,” he said. 

McKinsey, in fact, found that personalization most often drives a 10% to 15% revenue lift, with company-specific results ranging from 5% to 25% depending on sector and execution, according to its personalization research. 

The same study also concluded that the fastest-growing companies drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than slower-growing ones. For a startup, the logic is simple: the same customer, arriving with the same intent, sees something more relevant to them and is more likely to buy. 

Personalization, however, only works if people keep opening the app, and that’s where the more ambitious brands are pulling ahead. Poharkar described apps with online pet clinics, vaccine trackers for parents of babies, interactive color guides for fashion shoppers, AI try-ons and games built for high engagement. 

“The bigger shift is that brands are thinking about what gives someone a reason to open the app when they’re not shopping.”

Chewy shows how far that idea can go. The pet retailer launched Connect With a Vet in 2020, letting pet parents reach a licensed veterinarian for advice and referrals, and the service has since surpassed one million consultations; a customer who asks a vet about their dog’s itchy skin inside a retailer’s app is going to see that retailer’s recommended shampoo long before they see a competitor’s ad. 

Starbucks has built the same kind of habit around loyalty rather than content. Its app-based Rewards program reached an all-time high of 35.5 million active U.S. members in its most recent fiscal first quarter, and the company has since reworked the program into three tiers, with new benefits aimed at its most engaged members.

Most startups won’t have Starbucks’ scale, but the principle still holds at any size: the app earns its place on the phone by being useful between purchases. 

The real work starts after launch 

This is where many brands stumble. The largest gap Poharkar sees is between what a brand wants to build and whether it has a plan for getting people to use it.

“We see a lot of thought go into features and functionality, but the real work starts after launch,” he explained. Acquiring the right users, keeping them engaged, bringing them back and turning that engagement into revenue each need their own logic. 

“Without that logic, an app just becomes another forgotten download on someone’s phone.” In his view, “the real advantage comes from having a playbook for acquisition, engagement, retention and revenue.”

Measurement firm Adjust’s Mobile App Trends 2026 report found that for ecommerce apps, day one retention dropped to 12.6% in 2025, and day 30 retention held at just 3%. 

In practice, that means most people who download a shopping app have stopped opening it within a month. Here, a feature roadmap feels like progress, but the plan for what happens in the weeks after install is what decides whether the project pays off.

“We often see brands apply the same acquisition playbook they use for web and expect the same economics,” Poharkar noted. When nearly all new installs disappear within weeks, paying to put the app in front of strangers mostly buys downloads that won’t last.

The CEO further argued that “a mobile app works best as an owned channel for your highest-value, most loyal customers,” the people who already like what you sell. “The goal isn’t to keep paying to bring people back, but to give the right customers a reason to come back on their own.”

Across AppMaker’s merchants, app users make up just 1% to 2% of the customer base but bring in between 15% and 42% of digital revenue, representing a pattern that lines up with the broader evidence: a small and committed group of customers can carry a surprising share of the business, so the smarter use of budget is keeping that group engaged rather than paying to widen it. 

The holiday window 

With the holiday season getting closer, Poharkar’s advice is to get an app live before it starts, which still leaves time to build something tied to the season – think personalized home screens, exclusive drops and loyalty rewards, for example. 

Timing matters because the season just keeps getting bigger, and more of it happens on phones. Adobe reported that U.S. consumers spent a record $257.8 billion online between November 1 and December 31 last year, up 6.8% year over year; mobile’s share peaked on Christmas Day at 66.5% of online sales, which is exactly when people are browsing on the couch rather than at a desk.

Poharkar’s case, though, is about what comes after that. Holiday campaigns tend to bring in a wave of one-time buyers who never return, while a brand that uses the season to move its best customers onto an app walks away with a direct line to them. 

“The opportunity isn’t just to capture holiday revenue but to leave the season with an owned customer relationship,” he stressed. AppMaker’s own benchmark puts the repeat-purchase rate for app customers at around 60%, compared with 20% on the web.

This is also where the build-or-buy question gets practical. “Building an app in-house is a big investment of time, engineering effort and money, and you then have to keep maintaining it as the ecosystem changes.” 

For a startup with a three-month runway to the holidays and a small engineering team, though, the tradeoff is hard to ignore. Every hour spent on app infrastructure is an hour taken away from the product.

The brands that get the most out of mobile apps treat them as a relationship with a small group of loyal customers, and put their budget and effort into giving those people reasons to return. A startup that does this well over the holidays could come out of it with something worth more than a strong December: customers who keep opening the app in January.

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