We Tapped That

Luma Launch’s recent investment, Tapcart, is changing the eCommerce game.
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The Santa Monica based tech company can turn a Shopify store into a fully native iPhone app in minutes—allowing eCommerce retailers the ability to create, customize and preview an app for free.

The service solves multiple problems for both eCommerce retailers and customers by offering a user experience that far surpasses visiting a mobile website. Customers receive a better shopping experience while store owners can better engage with their customers.

Looking at the numbers

The internet and mobile web are approaching an interesting phase. Previously, mobile apps far outweighed 'mobile optimized' web experiences for a few reasons—native apps provided a richer user experience and 3g limited in-browser functionality. In the grand scheme, native mobile apps were a short-term fix for short-term connectivity problems and in a LTE, wifi-everywhere world, those problems have all but disappeared.

That said, the numbers tell an underlying story – there’s far higher percentage of mobile traffic than mobile eCommerce orders placed. Mobile eCommerce is on the rise, however, 80% of abandoned shopping carts come from mobile shoppers and of the $4 Trillion in abandoned carts at least $250 billion was recoverable in the U.S. alone.

Improving the retailer and customer experience

That’s where Tapcart comes in, the product instantly turns any Shopify store into a native mobile app and provides an instant checkout customer experience with deeper analytics for eCommerce retailers. In the near-term, they are lowering the barrier to entry of having a beautiful, native iPhone app with extremely valuable features. It used to require a lot of time, money and effort to build an app, but Tapcart is able to do all of this at a fraction of the cost. Some of these features include rich push notifications, 3D Touch notifications with the ability to transact on the lockscreen, customizable designs, real-time updates and live sync to Shopify, just to name a few.


Push notifications are an incredibly valuable feature to increase engagement and retention: they result in up to 26% higher mobile app open rates and 92% higher retention rates. These numbers outperform email campaigns significantly and essentially generate sales on demand.


Brands also rely on social ads to convert customers, however, when they direct those customers to a mobile optimized Shopify site, the checkout process includes four impossible steps (okay maybe not impossible, but definitely painful). 

With Tapcart, brands have the option to deep link social ads to the native app product page which features an Apple Pay button for an immediate transaction and instant checkout—that’s the kind of experience retailers want to provide their customers.

One day, browsers will support multiple login credentials and instant checkout authentication, and when that happens, Tapcart will be there to support eCommerce retailers and their existing customer base generated by their native app. Until then, Tapcartis improving the mobile shopping experience and increasing orders with instant checkout for brands like Salt GypsyMoney and Mr. Hardys.