GSF Car Parts Skipped a £500K Native Build and Launched Their App in Under 3 Months

GSF Car Parts is one of the UK's largest automotive parts distributors, selling to garages, workshops, and car owners through 212+ physical stores and a high-traffic retail website built on a headless front end over Magento. 

They wanted a native app to give retail customers exclusive pricing and offers, escape rising Google Ads costs, and stand up a direct push channel. They were looking at the prospect of spending around £500,000 for a custom native build, on top of a dedicated team in-house to manage it.

MobiLoud gave them an alternative: the same result without the half-million pound price tag, without hiring new staff, live in under three months.

Snapshot

• Vertical: Automotive parts (B2B and B2C)
• Platform: Headless front end on Magento
• Key metrics:
  
  • 19,000 active app users in the last 30 days
  • 12,000 push subscribers
  • 5 minutes 35 seconds average engagement per active user (vs ~2 minutes 20 seconds on the website)
  • Launched in under 3 months
• Business impact:
  
  • Avoided a ~£500,000 native build and the team needed to maintain it
  • Stood up push notifications as a new direct marketing channel
  • Built a dedicated app-exclusive products page to drive download intent
  • Maintained room to expand internationally (currency and language) through the app

"The value for money from you guys is incredible, right the way from the build to the ongoing support, to providing templates and other assets for us. My advice would be: speak to these guys, get involved. This is something really special."
-- Chris Barella, Digital Director, GSF Car Parts

The Roadblock

GSF's retail website is the front door to a deeply complex catalogue. About 140,000 SKUs, a digital car parts lookup, and a live API call to the DVLA (the UK's vehicle registration agency) on every vehicle lookup. 

That makes the site feature-rich, but heavy, and complex on the back-end.

There was also a pricing problem. GSF runs both a B2B trade business and a B2C retail business off the same catalogue, and the two pricing tiers compete with each other.

"We have channel conflict as far as pricing is concerned because of the B2B and B2C differences. And of course, prices are very competitive. So quite often our retail pricing comes very close to our workshop pricing. The app was a way that we were looking to be able to offer our customers overall slightly better pricing than the main website itself."

Chris had been through a native build before. At his previous employer, he watched a fully native app take nine months and almost £600,000 to ship, and that was eight years ago.

"We were looking at maybe five or six months to build, and again, probably approaching about half a million pounds. And then of course once you've built it, you need to have another small team within your business to keep all that unique content up to date."

A native build meant a long timeline and essentially a seven-figure commitment, taking into account the staffing needed to maintain a second product separate from the website. 

They started looking for an alternative.

Why They Chose MobiLoud

Chris researched several options before talking to MobiLoud. 

He talked with Pietro, MobiLoud’s founder, who had an honest conversation with him about what the app could do for their business, and how MobiLoud could bring it to life.

"He was very down to earth, very open and honest with me, and he made some quite bold statements around potentially the impact that the app would have. Equally, how quickly you could get it off the ground for me and operational. You said within three months, and in fact it was slightly less than that, which was fantastic."

The other thing that stood out: GSF didn't want a stripped-down version of their site. They wanted exclusive products, exclusive pricing, push, and the headroom to add a loyalty scheme and international support later. 

MobiLoud's team built around those requirements rather than against them.

From the first call, Chris had a clear vision: app-exclusive pricing, app-exclusive products, a dedicated landing page, and push as a new channel.

"The app itself is a very efficient way to run your business, predominantly because you don't have the significant additional costs you do with Google advertising. So we wanted to look at every possible way to get customers to download and install the app. One was better pricing. The other was unique offers, promotions, and a loyalty scheme, and absolutely very unique products."

Launch and Results

A Bespoke App, Without the Baggage

The app launched in under three months, with the same end-user experience they expected from a custom app - but without the baggage that comes with keeping a custom app up to date.

"The way that it functions and works, it seems like a bespoke build that you don't have to worry about updating."

Automatic Adoption

Even better was the customer reaction to the app.

If there was any concern about whether customers would actually use the app, that was quickly put to bed. They didn’t even have to push it that hard, and a significant number of customers had already downloaded it.

"We've added some banners to the homepage of the site. We've sent one single email out to our subscriber base, letting them know that we now have an app. To be absolutely honest, we haven't really got going yet on promoting it. So we are really pleasantly surprised that it has grown very quickly."

The numbers from the first 30 days after launch:

• 19,000 active app users (people who opened the app and did something, not just sessions)
• 12,000 push subscribers in OneSignal
• 5 minutes 35 seconds average engagement time per active user

The website, by comparison, averages 2 minutes 20 seconds to 2 minutes 30 seconds of engagement.

"That's really good, isn't it? They're spending much more time and probably digging deeper, looking at more content, which is fantastic. Bearing in mind as well that the app does work a bit faster than the website does."

A More Convenient User Experience

Chris himself felt the extra convenience the app delivered over visiting their site in the browser.

"When you get the app on your phone, you find yourself just not using your web browser anymore because it's just so instant and convenient. I have to keep stopping myself because I'm supposed to be testing the app and the website, but I keep just jumping straight into the app every time."

Opening the app was habitual - as it’s becoming for their customers, as well.

Unlocking a New Channel with Push Notifications

Push, which was entirely new to GSF, has already started to pay off. The team had never run push notifications before launching the app.

"The responses from our very first push, which was only about a week ago, have been really, really positive. We learnt a lot. You taught us exactly how to do it, how to set it up. The team member in marketing who does it now is really enjoying building them and setting them up and monitoring them as well. We would be doing a lot more push going forward. It's great value. We pay very little for push. So why would you not do it as often as you can?"

What's next: more app-exclusive content, currency and language options to support international expansion, and personalised push based on user behaviour and lifecycle stage.

The Takeaway

For an enterprise team running a headless Magento stack, a 140,000-SKU catalogue, and pricing channel conflict between B2B and B2C, the cost and complexity of a native app would usually be insane.

MobiLoud gave them exactly what they needed, at a fraction of the cost. And we gave them all the help they needed to launch and grow their app, with minimal drag.

"You guys, I can't believe that there's so much resources and help available. Right down to the point where you provided us with templates for our push notifications. This is the one you should send out before you launch the app, Chris. This is the one when you launch, and this is the one post launch. That level of detail.

All I had to do was point you at our website and you pretty much just did everything from then on. The very first iteration you showed me was probably polished to about 95% of what we wanted.

The value for money from you guys is incredible, right the way from the build to the ongoing support, to providing templates and other assets for us. My advice would be: speak to these guys, get involved. This is something really special."

Want to see what a native app for your store could look like? Book a free strategy call and we'll show you a preview of your app, walk you through the launch timeline, and break down the impact a low-overhead app can have for your business.