How to Integrate Your Shopify Loyalty Program Into a Mobile App

A loyalty program gives customers a reason to come back. A mobile app makes it easier for them to do it.

Put the two together, and you have a powerful revenue channel. And a win-win.

Your most engaged customers get a convenient place to shop, check their points, redeem rewards and access VIP benefits. While you get a direct line to those customers, along with more opportunities to drive repeat purchases through push notifications, exclusive offers and loyalty campaigns.

The problem is that all the work you’ve put into building the perfect loyalty program on your Shopify store doesn’t always carry over to your mobile app.

But there is a way to launch a Shopify mobile app that works with your complete loyalty program, regardless of which platform you use or how customized your setup is.

Keep reading and we’ll explain how.

Shopify Loyalty Programs In Mobile Apps: The Short Answer

A mobile app can make your Shopify loyalty program significantly more effective.

It gives customers a convenient place to check points, view rewards, monitor their VIP status and redeem benefits. Push notifications also allow you to actively promote rewards, bonus-points campaigns and expiring benefits instead of relying on customers to remember the program exists.

The challenge is bringing your complete loyalty experience into the app.

Most Shopify mobile app builders only support a small selection of loyalty platforms. And these integrations may not include every feature or quirk of your loyalty program, as it works on your website.

MobiLoud is different - instead of rebuilding your store, it lets you build an app on top of your existing tech stack, so everything (including your loyalty program) carries over to your app. No limitations, no compatibility issues.

Why Loyalty-Focused Brands Are A Natural Fit For Mobile Apps 

Loyalty programs and mobile apps are built around the same goal: getting customers to come back more often.

A loyalty program gives customers an incentive to return. They can earn points, unlock rewards, move through VIP tiers and access benefits that become more valuable the longer they stay with the brand.

A mobile app removes the friction involved in acting on those incentives.

Instead of searching for your site, opening a mobile browser and logging in again, customers can access your store directly from their home screen. They remain signed into their account and can immediately see what they have earned.

There’s also a significant overlap between the customers most likely to join a loyalty program and those most likely to download an app.

These are not first-time visitors who are still deciding whether they trust your brand. They are existing customers who already know your products and have a reason to return.

That makes a mobile app an ideal owned channel for your highest-value customers.

It gives them a more convenient shopping experience, while giving you a direct way to reach them without depending entirely on email, search, social media or paid advertising.

Your loyalty program helps turn customers into repeat buyers. Your mobile app gives those repeat buyers a better place to shop.

How A Mobile App Helps You Get More From Your Loyalty Program

Launching a mobile app doesn’t just give customers another place to access your loyalty program. It also brings more visibility to your loyalty program, as well as making it easier for customers to engage with the program.

Your Loyalty Program Becomes More Visible

One of the biggest problems with loyalty programs is that customers forget they exist.

The program may be hidden behind a small widget, buried in the account menu or only mentioned after a customer has already reached checkout.

Customers may have points or rewards available without realizing it.

A mobile app gives you more control over how prominently the program appears.

You can make points, rewards and VIP status visible from the app homepage, navigation menu or customer account. You can also highlight loyalty benefits throughout the shopping journey rather than expecting customers to seek them out.

This turns loyalty from a background feature into a central part of the customer experience.

You Make Rewards Easier To Use

A loyalty program only creates value when customers understand it and use it.

The mobile app gives customers a convenient place to:

• Check their points balance
• See how they can earn more points
• View available rewards
• Redeem points
• Monitor progress toward the next VIP tier
• Find their referral link
• Access members-only offers or products

Because customers remain logged in, they don’t need to repeatedly enter their credentials before accessing the program.

Reducing these small points of friction can make customers more likely to engage with the rewards they’ve earned.

The Loyalty Program Gets Customers Coming Back More Often

Your mobile app will become the main home for your loyalty program. And in doing so, it drives more traffic to your store.

Instead of customers only thinking about loyalty when they are already placing an order, you can leverage your loyalty program to create additional reasons to open the app.

These might include:

• Double-points events
• App-exclusive rewards
• Members-only product drops
• Early access for VIP customers
• Birthday rewards
• Referral campaigns
• New rewards becoming available
• Progress toward the next loyalty tier

This gives the app a purpose beyond being another version of your storefront.

Customers have an ongoing reason to check it, even when they didn’t originally open their phone intending to make a purchase.

Use Push Notifications To Drive Loyalty Engagement

Push notifications are one of the biggest advantages a mobile app offers over a mobile website.

They give you a direct way to bring customers back to the program at the right moment.

You can notify customers when:

• They earn a new reward
• They are close to reaching the next VIP tier
• Their points are about to expire
• A double-points campaign begins
• A new VIP benefit becomes available
• A members-only product launches
• Their birthday reward is ready
• A referral earns them points

Without these reminders, customers need to remember to visit your website and check the program themselves.

Push notifications make your loyalty program active rather than passive.

You’re no longer simply waiting for customers to notice a reward. You can tell them when something valuable is available and bring them directly to the relevant page in the app.

Drive More Repeat Purchases

A more visible and accessible loyalty program creates more opportunities for customers to act on their rewards.

Customers have a clearer reason to make their next purchase, add another item to their order or spend enough to unlock the next benefit.

It increases engagement, and builds the kind of loyalty that turns a customer from a casual buyer to a true fan of your brand.

What It Takes To Bring Your Full Loyalty Experience Into An App

Integrating your loyalty program in a new surface is more work than it appears.

It’s not just displaying the customer’s point balance in their account. It means bringing all the custom logic and the full loyalty experience you’ve built on your website into the app.

That starts with the core loyalty functionality. Customers should be able to see how many points they have, understand how to earn more and redeem them for the same rewards available on your store.

VIP tiers need to carry over too. Customers should be able to see their current status, understand their benefits and monitor their progress toward the next level.

If your program includes referrals, customers should be able to access and share their referral links from inside the app.

Then there are all the other features that may be connected to your program:

• Custom earning rules
• Birthday rewards
• Free products or shipping rewards
• Members-only prices and collections
• Paid memberships
• Loyalty landing pages
• Product-page loyalty widgets
• Checkout redemption
• Reviews that award points
• Subscription-related loyalty benefits
• Shopify POS and omnichannel rewards
• Email and SMS loyalty flows
• Custom account pages
• Bespoke rewards or branded loyalty experiences

Popular loyalty platforms can touch a large number of storefront surfaces. Smile, for example, supports loyalty features across product pages, checkout, customer accounts and dedicated loyalty pages, alongside connections with tools such as Klaviyo, Gorgias, Judge.me and Recharge.

A complete mobile integration should bring this whole experience into the app; not produce a limited experience that feels watered-down compared to your site.

How Loyalty Integrations Work With Shopify Mobile App Builders

The typical Shopify mobile app builder doesn’t carry over your full site experience into your app.

What you’re doing is rebuilding your web storefront inside your mobile app.

You’re working with pre-built templates, dragging and dropping blocks onto a canvas, and then using custom integrations to make it work with the Shopify apps and other third-party tools from your site.

This leads to two common problems.

Your Loyalty App May Not Be Supported

Every app builder supports a different collection of loyalty tools.

If your loyalty platform isn’t included in the builder’s integration directory, you may need to:

• Switch loyalty providers
• Pay for a custom integration
• Use a workaround
• Remove loyalty from the app
• Choose a different mobile app builder

This means the mobile app can end up dictating which loyalty platform you use, rather than letting you choose the best platform for your business.

A Supported Integration May Still Have Feature Gaps

Seeing your loyalty provider’s logo in an integration directory doesn’t guarantee that your complete loyalty program will work.

The integration may only support a specific part of the platform.

It might only let you show the rewards page inside your app, or add only specific widgets from the loyalty app.

Those integrations may be enough for some brands.

But your loyalty setup may also use custom account components, product page messaging, non-standard rewards, paid memberships, connected apps or bespoke earning rules that fall outside the supported implementation.

Some integrations also have explicit limitations on the types of rewards you can offer in the app; if you’ve set up custom rewards, these might not be supported with your app provider.

That is the feature-parity problem.

The app builder may support the loyalty platform without supporting the complete loyalty experience you have built with it.

Customizations Need To Be Rebuilt

Any custom loyalty functionality is even less likely to carry over.

You may have created:

• A custom loyalty dashboard
• Bespoke rewards
• A branded VIP experience
• Special earning actions
• Members-only content
• Loyalty functionality inside a custom customer account
• Connections between loyalty, subscriptions and reviews
• Custom redemption or retention flows

These features don’t exist as standard components inside the app builder.

They need to be rebuilt for the separate mobile frontend, assuming the builder can recreate them at all.

You then have two versions of the same experience to maintain.

Changes to your website may also need to be implemented separately inside the app, adding more development work and more opportunities for the two channels to fall out of sync.

Supporting your loyalty provider is not necessarily the same as supporting the loyalty program you’ve built with it.

How Mobiloud Brings Your Full Loyalty Program Into Your Mobile App

MobiLoud works differently from most Shopify mobile app builders.

Instead of creating a separate storefront and rebuilding your loyalty program inside it, MobiLoud uses your existing Shopify site as the foundation of the app.

That means your complete loyalty experience carries over automatically.

No matter which loyalty app you use, customers get the same experience:

• Points balances
• Rewards
• Earning rules
• VIP tiers
• Referral flows
• Loyalty pages
• Account experience
• Redemption options

Your customizations carry over too.

If you have custom rewards, loyalty pages, membership experiences or other functionality around your loyalty program, you don’t need to recreate them inside a separate app frontend.

If they work on your mobile site, they work in your mobile app.

The same applies to the tools connected to your loyalty program.

Your reviews, subscriptions, customer accounts, email platform, support tools and other integrations continue working together as they do today.

MobiLoud doesn’t rely on a fixed list of predefined loyalty integrations. Its approach allows tools such as Smile, LoyaltyLion, Yotpo Loyalty and others to run just as they do on your website, with no limitations or custom development.

You can customize how they work in your app too - if you want to offer higher points or unique rewards to app users, you can do that (and MobiLoud’s team will help you build this exactly how you want it).

The result is complete feature parity between your website and mobile app, regardless of which loyalty provider you use or how customized your program is.

MobiLoud doesn’t just support your loyalty app. It supports the complete loyalty experience you’ve built around it.

How The Best Shopify Loyalty Apps Integrate With Mobile App Builders

Shopify has a wide range of loyalty apps, from straightforward points and rewards tools to advanced platforms for VIP programs, referrals, memberships and omnichannel loyalty.

The best choice depends on the type of program you want to run. But if you’re also planning to launch a mobile app, you need to consider whether your mobile app builder supports the loyalty platform—and how much of its functionality will carry over.

These are some of the top loyalty programs for Shopify right now:

• Smile.io: A popular loyalty platform for creating points programs, rewards, VIP tiers and referrals.
• Rivyo: A combined reviews, loyalty and referrals platform with points, rewards, VIP tiers and store credit.
• LoyaltyLion: A customizable loyalty and engagement platform built around points, rewards, referrals and VIP experiences.
• Yotpo Loyalty & Rewards: A flexible loyalty platform for running points, rewards, referrals and VIP programs, particularly for larger brands.
• Joy Loyalty: A Shopify loyalty app offering points, rewards, referrals, VIP tiers and paid memberships.
• BON Loyalty: A loyalty platform for points, rewards, referrals, VIP tiers and branded loyalty pages.
• Yuko: An all-in-one loyalty app combining points, rewards, VIP tiers, referrals, memberships and product reviews.
• Koin: A Shopify-native app for store credit and cashback rewards.

So do these loyalty apps work with your mobile app?

Here’s whether some of the most well-known Shopify mobile app builders offer integrations for these loyalty apps:

If an integration isn’t publicly listed, it doesn’t necessarily mean an integration is impossible. The app builder could be able to offer a workaround or develop something custom.

But that means it won’t work out of the box. It’ll likely need extra development, with higher cost, longer time to market, and more complexity to maintain. 

With MobiLoud, you don’t need to choose your loyalty platform based on a predefined integration directory.

Your existing loyalty setup runs through the same storefront that powers your website, so your points, rewards, tiers, referrals, loyalty pages and customizations all carry over automatically. If the loyalty experience works on your Shopify site, it works in your mobile app too.

Your mobile app adapts to your existing loyalty stack, rather than forcing your loyalty stack to adapt to the app builder.

Final Takeaways

Loyalty-focused brands are a natural fit for mobile apps.

Both are designed to bring existing customers back, increase repeat purchases and build stronger long-term relationships. And a mobile app is the best way to elevate your loyalty program, and give it more visibility in front of the exact segment it’s made for.

But you only get the full value when your complete loyalty experience works inside the app.

With most Shopify mobile app builders, this is not easy to do. 

Unsupported platforms may require custom development. Supported platforms can still leave out reward types, custom functionality or other important features.

MobiLoud removes this problem.

Instead of rebuilding your loyalty program in a separate mobile frontend, MobiLoud works on top of your existing Shopify store.

Your loyalty provider, points, rewards, VIP tiers, referrals, customizations and connected tools all carry over, with the same experience customers already get on your website.

A loyalty program gives customers a reason to return. MobiLoud gives them the best possible place to do it - without forcing you to rebuild or compromise the program you already have.