How to Get Your Ecommerce App to Market Faster (Without Cutting Corners)

You’ve decided to launch a mobile app. And, if you’re like many businesses, you might be under pressure to get it out as fast as possible.

It’s one of the tricky parts to navigate with building a mobile app. Custom apps take a long time to build. And if you’re pitching it to leadership by saying you’re not going to see the end product until a year from now… the pitch might not go over well.

Time to market is an important consideration. But there’s also a danger in taking it too far, and sacrificing quality in the interest of getting an app live as fast as possible.

Like anything, it’s a balancing act. You want to find the right mix between speed and quality.

Keep reading to learn how to get your app to market faster - without sacrificing anything important along the way.

How Long Should It Take to Build a Mobile App?

The time it takes to launch your app can vary massively.

The two key variables are how you build it, and what, exactly, you’re building.

First: different build approaches influence time to market significantly. A custom Swift build for iOS and a custom Kotlin build for Android will take a long time - typically in the range of 6-12 months. While a no-code build can be done in as little as a few days.

Then there’s what you build - the features and functionality of your app.

Even for a custom-coded app, you could launch fairly quickly if it’s a basic shell of an app - products, cart, checkout, that’s it.

If you want to build more features, or more complicated features, it’s going to take longer. That’s obvious. More work = more time.

That’s why there’s such a wide range here. A no-code app from a template takes little time whatsoever. But a custom build, with AR virtual try-on and other bells and whistles will take considerably longer.

Cost of Delay: What Waiting to Launch Costs You

Time to market is an important factor to consider when thinking about how to build your app, and what to build in your app.

There’s an economic force at play here. Product teams have a name for it: cost of delay.

This means the cost to your business of delaying your product’s launch.

An app is an investment, and an investment that only pays off once it's running. A half-finished app doesn’t generate any revenue. It likely won’t generate any revenue the day of the launch, either - because you still need time to accumulate downloads and get users.

The gap between launching a month from now and launching seven months from now is six months of revenue. That’s what it’s costing you (financially) to delay your launch.

But it’s not the only cost.

Why a Long Build Risks Launching an Outdated App

There's a second cost to a long build: the longer you spend building, the more ecommerce, and your store, changes.

You have an idea how people shop and what your customers want now. But is that going to be the same nine months from now?

By the time you go live, you could be launching something that’s completely out of date.

This is a bigger risk now than ever before, because of how fast ecommerce is changing. AI, agentic storefronts, there’s a huge risk of getting left behind if your app takes close to a year to launch.

Or, your brand might evolve over that time. You might go through a redesign, rebrand, shift how you sell on your site. Perhaps even migrating platforms.

You design and configure the build based on parity with your site now - the longer the build takes, the more likely that parity isn’t there once you go live.

Why the Fastest Launch Isn't the Best Launch

While time to market is important, it’s not everything.

You can stand up something that technically works in a few days. But just being first is worth less than it sounds: first-mover research finds that launch velocity on its own correlates with disappointment more often than with advantage. 

Speed only pays off when what you ship is good. If you launch a poor product fast, all you have is your first negative review sooner.

A mobile app is a long-term asset. Quality matters. You could get to revenue faster with a simpler build. But if it’s a worse result, and you earn less from the app than you could, your faster build will eventually end up costing you.

This idea is pretty obvious. The tricky part is finding the balance. You have no way of knowing for sure when a quicker launch means less revenue potential for your app - and it’s not worth taking years on your build, just to ensure the ultimate best result possible.

What’s the Best Way to Launch a Mobile App (From a Time to Market Perspective)?

If you’re planning to launch an app for your store, you’re looking at one of three ways to do it.

• A DIY no-code app builder
• A custom agency/in-house build
• MobiLoud’s service-based approach, built from your existing site

An app builder probably gets you to market fastest. There are some that claim you can launch an app in as little as an hour.

Realistically, that’s an exaggeration. Especially if we’re talking about a quality mobile app for a serious ecommerce brand - the timeline is going to be a little longer (it takes about a week to get published in the app stores, to start with).

The realistic timeline is perhaps 2-4 weeks, assuming no major customizations or issues crop up.

At the high end, a fully custom build, as mentioned earlier, could be anywhere in the range of 6-12 months.

MobiLoud falls in the goldilocks zone - 6-8 weeks (potentially less), for a custom mobile app, powered by your existing tech stack.

It’s likely to be a little longer than building a no-code app with a DIY app builder. But we’re talking a matter of a few weeks.

You get a higher quality, more flexible result for a slightly longer time to launch.

(and in some cases, not even any longer to launch. Like Pharmazone, who launched an app with MobiLoud in just two weeks, which now drives over 60% of their online revenue).

“No one really believed that we were going to have an app in under a month, with the setup that we had to do initially. But within just two weeks, it was done.”

Final Thoughts on the Time to Market Question

When you’re launching a revenue-generating ecommerce mobile app, the longer it takes to launch, the more it’s costing you.

The cost is opportunity cost. What the app could be contributing for your business, but isn’t, because it doesn’t exist yet.

It’s one thing you really need to consider when canvassing development options for your app. Not defaulting to the fastest option possible, but getting the right mix of quality and speed.

This is where MobiLoud really stands out.

MobiLoud gets you live fast - 6-8 weeks or less - without sacrificing quality.

It’s an end product roughly as good as a custom app you’d spend close to 12 months building (not to mention the actual build cost), live much faster, and much more cost-efficient.

Get a free preview of your app now to see what it could look like, and walk through the build process with our team.