Shopney

Shopney helps merchants to build native mobile shopping apps and offer a best-in-class mobile shopping experience without the need of hiring a full on development firm.

The tool comes in 4 components:

• Design - building the actual look and feel of the app.
• Notifications - being able to send rich free and unlimited rich push notifications.
• Messages - live chatting with your customers
• Integrations - being sure all your tools work together with your mobile app.

In-app live chat enables you to resolve customer issues and delight them with personalized discounts or product recommendations during the shopping journey. This is a unique feature to Shopney integrated with Shopify Ping.

You can select the best-fit theme layout for your store according to your business type, inventory and product photography.

The in-app live chat functionality is huge for brands that are already using real-time live chat for customer acquisition and retention and want to keep that experience seamless into their mobile app. I honestly don't see many live chat tools working inside mobile apps and this is truly important for taking loyalty to the next level.

I also like their easy to test out and implement themes. They have themes specifically designed for fashion, for example, to ensure the user can scroll product images easily and add the right styles to their bag.

The in-app live chat functionality is huge for brands that are already using real-time live chat for customer acquisition and retention and want to keep that experience seamless into their mobile app. I honestly don't see many live chat tools working inside mobile apps and this is truly important for taking loyalty to the next level.

I also like their easy to test out and implement themes. They have themes specifically designed for fashion, for example, to ensure the user can scroll product images easily and add the right styles to their bag.

Typically someone on the marketing team, such as the head of marketing, head of eCommerce or you as the CEO/founder are going to set this up. The good news is, you don't need a developer!

Simply setup your design, choose a theme, bring in your branding and colors and iconography. Integrate with all of your review and loyalty tools, they have all the popular tools integrated, and publish.

It will take 2-5 days to get approved and live on the Apple and Play stores, and that is just from the platform side, they do actually review each app before publishing to their directories.

Once live on the app stores, you need to setup a way to promote the app to your audience and customers, which can be done in-store, if you're brick and mortar, on-site, through email, or really any other way you want.

You will want to update the app on an ongoing basis, perhaps to give app-only campaigns or discounts and further incentivize app usage.

This is a product for loyalty-centric brands who already have a strong connection with their audience and want to foster that in an improved mobile site experience. Perfect for heavy social brands, personal brands that sell merch like celebrities, and really any store doing reasonable revenue - let's say $50k/month or more - and seeing 10% of their revenue or more coming from repeat purchasers.

Another great fit customer is a retail store with Shopify and Shopify POS who wants the in-store customers to easily download the app and buy online.

On the flip side, stores that are just starting out, trying to find product-market fit, or stores that have pass through customers that buy once and never come back, are not going to get a lot of value from a mobile app builder, instead focus on changing that - building loyalty in other ways like being authentic and creating compelling content. From there your customers will start to love you, and there will sort of be this natural demand that emerges where it will become clear when you should launch your mobile app.