What VTEX merchants actually need to know
An app channel for VTEX brands, without the storefront rebuild
The question is not whether a mobile app makes sense for your VTEX store. It is how to launch one without spending half a million on an agency build, hiring a mobile team alongside your VTEX IO engineers, or rebuilding the storefront you have already invested in.
Push reaches customers where email and search cannot
Email open rates have fallen for years, and the promotions folder eats a large share of what does get delivered. SMS works but carries compliance overhead, costs that scale with volume, and a customer-experience cap before opt-outs climb. The retention-channel ceiling for VTEX merchants is well below where it used to be.
Mobile apps change the shape of the channel. An icon on the home screen, persistent login, push notifications direct to the lock screen, and the install itself as a signal of your best 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 up to 7x mobile web rates, spend 10-50% more per order, and deliver roughly 3x the lifetime value. The ecommerce brands MobiLoud has shipped apps for show the same pattern: Pharmazone accounts for 63% of online revenue through the app, with abandoned cart push converting at 22%. Sleefs ships 3x revenue per user and 30% higher AOV. XCVI drives 4.8x revenue per app user against the same brand's mobile web. Modere shipped a multilingual ecommerce app across 7 languages and 10 markets within four weeks during a replatform.
Every other path rebuilds your VTEX storefront from scratch
The other routes to a VTEX mobile app all ask the same thing: rebuild your VTEX storefront in a separate codebase. Custom native (Swift, Kotlin, React Native) means replicating every VTEX IO app, Store Framework block, FastStore component, Master Data v2 schema, Sales Channel rule, B2B Suite workflow, marketplace seller flow, and integration against the VTEX APIs, in a different language and on a different release cycle. The team then carries the duplicated work going forward: every promotion, banner, price table, sales-channel update, and VTEX IO app addition ships twice.
The cost is real (custom-native costs $500K-$1M+/year fully loaded), but the deeper problem is the duplication itself. You are not paying for a mobile app; you are paying to maintain a second version of your VTEX storefront, separate from the first one. Custom-native is a rational engineering choice for teams with a real in-house mobile group at serious scale. For most VTEX merchants, the ongoing maintenance load is the issue that brings them here.
Your stack handles the commerce. Our team does the native engineering
MobiLoud is the combination of a native platform and a service team. The platform bridges your live VTEX store to an iOS and Android app and brings the features a native app needs built in: push notifications via OneSignal or Klaviyo, deep links into any page, 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 VTEX store plus our platform is a custom mobile app experience, built on the VTEX storefront you already operate. Every VTEX IO app, Store Framework block, FastStore component, Master Data v2 schema, Sales Channel rule, payment connector, B2B Suite workflow, and marketplace seller flow that ships on the web shows up in the app automatically.
Your VTEX team builds for the app on the same stack they already use: VTEX IO apps, Store Framework components, FastStore code, all 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 (custom payments, native analytics, a POS bridge) 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.
"In a very short amount of time, you got it up, you got it live in the app store."
Modere, on shipping a multilingual ecommerce app on MobiLoud across 7 languages and 10 markets in four weeks during a replatform. The same multi-region pattern applies to VTEX merchants operating across LATAM and beyond.
After launch is where the channel actually compounds
We are focused on the results we see ecommerce customers achieve regularly. The launch playbook is where we start: install prompts on your site, smart banners on mobile web, QR codes, email announcements to your existing customer base, 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, order and shipping updates, promotional campaigns), 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 VTEX merchants, 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 published 2,000+ apps since 2013. 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 VTEX store is the free preview: we build a working version of your VTEX 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.