What beauty brands actually need to know
An app channel for beauty brands, without the storefront rebuild
The question is not whether a mobile app makes sense for your beauty brand. It is how to launch one without signing up to maintain two versions of every drop, restock, and shade addition, or watching a revenue share grow with the channel you are trying to build.
Why beauty buyers convert 2x higher on app than mobile web
Kiokii, a Shopify beauty and lifestyle retailer, drives about 35% of online revenue through the MobiLoud app, with app users converting at roughly 2x the rate of mobile web and 6.7x higher ARPU. Yon-Ka Paris launched on Shopify Plus and has a 5/5 app-store rating across iOS and Google Play with strong repeat-buyer engagement. MASC, a men's skincare brand on Shopify, sees 5.1x higher ARPU on the app. NumberC drives 20-30% of total sales from the app.
The shape of the channel is what drives the number. An icon on the home screen, persistent login, push notifications direct to the lock screen for drops, restocks, and replenishment cues, and the install itself as a signal of your most engaged customers. Push reaches the customer where email and SMS cannot, and app users are already opted in by definition.
Across the ecommerce category, app users convert at 3-7x mobile web rates, spend 10-50% more per order, and deliver roughly 3x the lifetime value. For beauty brands selling replenishment products, the install signals a routine commitment, and the repeat-purchase cycle compounds from there.
Every other path rebuilds your shade finder, quiz funnel, and loyalty tiers from scratch
Off-the-shelf app builders rebuild your storefront inside their own platform, around their template system. Routine quiz funnels with conditional logic, shade-finder modules tied to your PDP, native AR try-on integrations, and loyalty tiers with custom reward rules sit outside the cart-and-checkout box the templates are designed around. The app ends up functioning like a parallel CMS, with parallel merchandising and a second dev track. On top of that, most template app builders take 1.75-2.5% of every in-app sale. On $10M/year in-app revenue, that costs $175K-$250K/year on top of the monthly fee, so the harder the channel works, the larger the bill.
Custom native (Swift, Kotlin, React Native) gets around the rebuild, but trades it for a 2-3 person mobile team and $250-400K-$1M+/year in fully loaded cost, plus the duplicated release cycle. It is the right call for brands at serious scale with a dedicated mobile team. For most beauty brands, the maintenance load on a second codebase is what brings them to MobiLoud.
Your stack stays the source; our team owns the iOS and Android side
MobiLoud is the combination of a native platform and a service team. The platform bridges your live store to an iOS and Android app and brings the features a native app needs built in: push notifications via Klaviyo or OneSignal, deep links into every collection and PDP, persistent login, native navigation, smart banners, in-app payments, and analytics tied into GA4, Firebase, or Triple Whale. The native integrations you would otherwise build once-per-app are built into the platform once.
Together, your existing ecommerce site plus our platform is a custom mobile app experience, built on the storefront you already operate. Every quiz funnel (Octane AI, Typeform), shade finder on the PDP, replenishment subscription tool (Recharge, Skio), loyalty program (Smile.io, LoyaltyLion), editorial template, Klaviyo flow, and review widget that ships on the site shows up in the app automatically. AR try-on is available two ways: web-based AR carries over from the site exactly; native AR SDKs (ModiFace, Perfect Corp, Banuba) integrate as a scoped Enterprise add-on. Works on Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, and custom platforms.
Your beauty team builds for the app the way they build for the site, on the release cycle they already have. Our team guides on the app-specific patterns and applies direct customizations to the app experience when something needs to look or behave differently in the app. The native SDK integrations that come up infrequently we handle from our side, and we manage the iOS and Android operational track: builds and submissions under your developer accounts, OS update cycles, certificate renewals, and store policy.
"On the marketing side, I feel very supported by MobiLoud's team. It feels like we're working with an app marketing agency that takes most of the work off our plate."
Summer Duan, Ecommerce Manager at Kiokii. The Shopify beauty and lifestyle retailer drives about 35% of online revenue through the app, with 2x mobile-web conversion and 6.7x higher ARPU.
After launch is where the channel actually compounds
We are focused on the results we see beauty customers achieve regularly. The launch playbook is where we start: install prompts on your site, smart banners on mobile web, QR codes on packaging and post-purchase inserts, email announcements to your existing customer base, influencer creators pushing the app alongside a launch, and an app-user incentive to drive the first wave of installs. The push strategy gets built into the integration we set up (abandoned cart, back-in-stock, drops, replenishment, influencer launches, VIP early access, win-backs for paused subscriptions), all sent directly from your existing Klaviyo or OneSignal account.
On Enterprise, the work does not stop at setup. Your customer success manager checks performance monthly against peer beauty brands, builds analytics dashboards on the app channel, reviews what is working in the category, and proposes what to try next. The push strategy gets refined as the channel grows.
MobiLoud has served 2,000+ brands. The results above are not exceptional, they are what the channel delivers when it is launched and managed properly. The fastest way to know whether it works for your brand is the free preview: we build a working version of your beauty mobile app from your live store in roughly 5 to 7 working days, so you can see exactly how it looks and feels before you commit to anything.