I’ve spent a lot of time working closely with Shopify merchants on their mobile apps, and I keep noticing the same thing: two stores can have nearly identical apps and get completely different results. The gap isn’t the app. It’s what happens after it launches.
Here’s what struggles look like:
- The app gets announced once and then forgotten
- Notifications are either turned off or only used to shout “Sale Today”
- The app feels like a copy of the website - no real reason to open it
- No one checks in on how it’s actually performing
Here’s what works:
- Giving app users something they can’t get elsewhere - early access, a small discount, loyalty perks
- Sending a few thoughtful notifications a week, tied to things that matter (restock, order updates), not noise
- Looking at the numbers monthly and adjusting, instead of setting and forgetting
- Paying close attention to the first 30 days after someone installs, since that’s when people decide if it’s worth keeping
What I’ve noticed most is that the stores doing well aren’t necessarily bigger or better resourced. They just treat the app like a relationship with their customer, not a feature they checked off a list.
If your app isn’t performing the way you hoped, start simple: look at installs versus how many of those people actually come back to buy. If installs are healthy but repeat purchases aren’t, it’s rarely a tech issue - it’s almost always something on this list.
Most of this comes from watching these patterns play out again and again while working with merchants on Apploy - happy to talk through what someone’s seeing with their own store.
Hey @VikashJ ,
This is a great observation. Launching an app is only the beginning the ongoing engagement strategy is usually what determines whether it becomes a valuable sales channel or just another installed app.
Out of curiosity, which metric have you found to be the strongest early indicator of long-term success during those first 30 days? Is it retention, repeat purchases, push notification engagement, or something else? It would be interesting to hear what has been the most predictive in your experience.
Thank You !
Hey @Steve_TopNewYork,
Thanks for asking - great question.
In my experience, push notification engagement (specifically the open rate on the first 2–3 notifications someone receives) has been the most predictive. It sounds small, but it tells you two things at once: whether the welcome/onboarding sequence is actually good, and whether the customer sees the app as worth paying attention to at all.
Retention and repeat purchases matter more in the long run, but they take longer to show up, so by the time you notice they’re low, you’ve usually already lost some of that early momentum. Push engagement in week one gives you a much faster signal - if people are opening those first notifications, they tend to stick around and convert later. If they’re not, that’s usually the first thing to fix.
Would be curious if others here are tracking something different as their early signal - feels like it might vary a bit by industry too (e.g. restock alerts probably hit differently for fashion vs. something like grocery or pharmacy).
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of using first-week push engagement as an early health indicator instead of waiting for retention numbers. Have you found that there’s a particular open rate threshold where you start to feel confident the onboarding is working?
Also if you found my questions and replies helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you could mark my reply as the solution. Thanks!