Tapcart

Tapcart is very easy to use and you can launch yourself or with a small team.

Bonus: Once installed you can send image push notifications, even better, gif push notifications which are an automatically generated compilation of your product images.

For the enterprise plan, they have Augmented Reality functionality. How cool is that?

Tapcart aims to increase your mobile conversion rate, as well as improving retention, repeat purchases, and therefore lifetime value.

You will want a marketer with basic CSS skills (or a small amount of developer time) to setup and launch a campaign within 2-4 hours of work, and 1-4 hours a month of maintenance.

For larger teams, you may have a meeting to discuss the value and implications of launching a referral program, select your referral marketing tool, and then have another meeting to discuss the right discounts and products to use in the campaign. This could involve working with your COO and Head of Ecommerce to discuss changes in margin, integrating inventory management strategies (such as using products that you want to liquidate), and how the referral marketing strategy will effect on-site behavior and experience.

While it can take only an hour or two to setup, it could take a bit longer for more complex stores. Most importantly, you want to setup your marketing campaigns around the app. App-wide sales, app exclusives, email campaigns driving to the app, acquisition campaigns driving to the app. Those things can take a lot more time.

It also takes a few days to submit and get approved for your apps to the iOS and Android stores.

As with most apps, launching it is only the first step, then you have to market it, study consumer behavior, and analyze and report on the results.

Since I’ve eluded to augmented reality a few times, it’s worth noting that setting that up requires a kind of photo shoot of your product, which means shipping it to a studio and paying for the functionality. It’s not complicated, but will cost a little bit and take a little bit more time.

The benefit of this branded app is higher for established brands focused on retention and lifetime customers. Apps like box or product subscriptions are perfect.

Typically, the best customers are around $1mil in revenue and growing quickly. Beauty and fashion, cosmetics/beauty, healthcare/wellness seem to be hot topic industries, with accessories and gadgets being slightly less appealing.

Stores that sell products with a low repeat purchase potential or brand new stores won't benefit as much from a tool like this.