Mobile App & Black Friday Experience

Executive summary
Download the short version of this case study, with the key metrics, client outcomes, and roadmap. 

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At a glance

• Industry: Apparel & lifestyle retail
• Region: United States (Chicago-based, nationwide D2C)
• Size: ~70 employees, $18M annual revenue
• Commerce stack: Shopify Plus, custom mobile app (iOS/Android)
• Key challenges: Black Friday campaigns felt generic, weak mobile experience, no retention lift from seasonal peaks

How the client found us

The brand had long worked with a New York marketing agency that consistently delivered strong paid traffic. After Black Friday 2023, both teams’ post-mortem showed the real blockers were platform and UX: mobile latency, checkout drop-offs, and one-size-fits-all promos that triggered SMS unsubscribes.

The agency introduced GetDevDone to jointly solve the structural issues ahead of Black Friday 2024. The retailer’s leadership was clear: create a mobile-first experience that withstands peak load, improves conversion, and builds a channel they own beyond one weekend.

Partnership model

• The agency led creative strategy & campaign concepts (white-label).
• GetDevDone engineered the platform, app UX, and integrations — operating under the agency’s brand, ensuring no channel conflict and strengthening agency-client trust.

The challenge: Black Friday as a bottleneck

For years, this U.S. apparel brand ran Black Friday the same way as everyone else: deep discounts, heavy ad spend, and basic SMS/email blasts. The outcome was predictable — a short-lived revenue spike that left them exhausted and offered no long-term growth.

• Mobile gap: With 70%+ of traffic from mobile, customers were frustrated by a sluggish Shopify storefront and frequent checkout drop-offs.
• Generic promotions: In crowded U.S. Black Friday campaigns, their offers looked no different from mid-market competitors. The brand’s identity was getting lost.
• Customer frustration: Post-Black Friday 2023 surveys highlighted real friction: “hard to navigate,” “slow checkout,” “too many irrelevant emails.”

The CEO summarized the frustration:

“We made money, but we left a lot on the table. Every year we run harder, and every year we hit the same wall.”

By mid-2024, they wanted more than “another discount push.” They wanted a mobile-first, differentiated Black Friday experience that would fix operational pain and create a repeatable growth channel.

Our approach: evidence-led, design thinking + mobile-first UX

Before writing a line of code, we worked with the leadership team to clarify growth targets, retention models, and ROI expectations. Together we mapped revenue streams across D2C and loyalty, defined how success would be measured, and aligned engineering choices with revenue impact, not just scalability.

The engagement began with discovery led by our Growth Architecture Center (GAC). Instead of rushing into development, we applied a design thinking process:

• User research: 12 moderated user sessions and  15 follow-up interviews with heavy mobile shoppers, 70 survey responses, plus analysis of 2023 funnel analytics, highlighted recurring failures.
• Journey mapping: drop-offs during peak traffic showed three major friction points:
  1. slow load → drop-offs
  2. too many fields → friction
  3. irrelevant offers → disengagement
• Prototyping & validation: Figma prototypes tested with live users before coding, ensuring the app solved real issues.

From this, we built a mobile app strategy that would:

• Reduce checkout friction (Apple Pay, Google Pay).
• Personalize promotions (dynamic homepage, wishlist-driven offers).
• Gamify retention (loyalty points, referral incentives).

Delivered solution (12 weeks):

• React Native app (iOS & Android) integrated with Shopify Plus via GraphQL API.
• Personalized Black Friday flows: wishlists and browsing history powered dynamic homepage offers.
• One-tap checkout: Apple Pay & Google Pay dramatically reduced friction.
• Gamified loyalty rewards: referral system rewarded purchases and drove peer-to-peer promotion.
• Performance-first design: engineered to handle 3x baseline traffic without downtime.

Because gamified loyalty models can attract fraud or abuse, we built guardrails — validation layers, reward thresholds, and fraud checks — to protect fairness without blocking genuine users. Anticipating 3x traffic spikes, we ran infra stress-tests and co-created incident playbooks with the client, giving them operational resilience beyond launch.

Roles & collaboration

• Agency (white-label lead): campaign concept, creative assets, audience strategy, promo calendar.
• GetDevDone: app architecture & UX, Shopify integration, payments, loyalty, data & analytics, peak readiness.
• Client team: content approvals, CX sign-off, UAT, CS process updates.

Business impact: Black Friday 2024 vs 2023

The impact wasn’t just better numbers — it changed how the business approached peak campaigns.

2023 baseline (4-day campaign):

• Conversion 2.5%; GMV ~$1.9M
• Checkout abandonment ~72%; median load >7s
• CTR <2% on SMS; unsubscribes spiked post-blast
• No app channel; support tickets +34% YoY

2024 with the mobile app & personalized flows:

• Conversion rate 3.1% (+22%) → That 0.6% lift translated into ~$420k incremental GMV over the 4-day campaign. 
• Checkout time −40% → abandonment dropped 8 pts (72% → 64%), recovering ~$110k in lost orders. 
• App adoption: ~2,500 installs during the Black Friday weekend and ~7,000 by the end of 6 weeks. Importantly, 25% of those users made repeat purchases within 60 days, proving the app became a retention channel, not just a seasonal gimmick.
• Engagement up 20% → shoppers spent longer in-app, with AOV up ~9% where personalized bundles were shown. 
• SMS ROI ~3x → CTR rose from <2% to 6.2%, while unsubscribes fell 25% thanks to behavior-based triggers and app push integration.
• Loyalty referrals doubled → ≈40% of app users engaged with referral mechanics, generating ~3,200 referral actions and adding ~$95k incremental revenue.
• Customer support load eased → checkout-related tickets down ~30% YoY, eliminating the need for extra seasonal hires.

Context vs peers (market lens, 2024): While many U.S. mid-market fashion brands reported flat or low single-digit YoY Black Friday growth, this program delivered ~18% GMV growth with measurable retention lift, largely attributable to owning the app channel and reducing friction.

The CEO said:

“We stopped shouting louder and started creating a better experience. Black Friday felt completely different this year — we stood out, not just because of price, but because customers enjoyed shopping with us.”

The CFO added:

“On paper, a 0.6% conversion lift doesn’t look dramatic. But for us, it meant half a million dollars in recovered and incremental revenue. That’s a meaningful swing at our scale.”

Why this engagement succeeded

• Evidence-based build — usability and funnel forensics proved what was broken (slow checkout, irrelevant promos), so fixes were real, not guesses.
• Value-for-money engineering — lean, owned app avoided $10–20k/month SaaS bloat; every tool chosen for measurable impact.
• White-label alignment with agency — the agency stayed front-of-house; GetDevDone was the silent engineering partner, strengthening trust instead of competing.
• Enablement, not lock-in — client CRM/marketing teams run push campaigns, loyalty flows, and CRO tests independently; GetDevDone supports only where escalation or roadmap planning is needed.
• Transparency and candor — we flagged trade-offs early: Android QA added two weeks; loyalty rewards were gamed with micro-orders. Guardrails (fraud checks, reward thresholds) were applied to harden the system.

The COO reflected:

“This was the first Black Friday we didn’t spend in firefight mode. The app isn’t just a campaign tool — it’s a channel we can steer year-round.”

Future growth roadmap (2025 and beyond)

The Black Friday 2024 project wasn’t just a campaign — it became the foundation for the brand’s long-term digital growth.

• Phase 2 (Q1 2025): expand CRO inside the app — A/B testing product bundles, experimenting with personalized journeys.
• Phase 3 (H2 2025): deploy AI-driven churn prediction in AWS SageMaker — identify at-risk customers and launch proactive win-backs.
• Phase 4 (Black Friday 2025): pilot AR try-on experiences for apparel SKUs — tested against conversion, returns, and CSAT metrics (not hype, measured value).
• Ongoing: CRO programs, continuous optimization, reporting, and joint campaign execution available white-label through agency partners.

This roadmap reassures executives that Black Friday 2024 wasn’t a one-off win. Instead, it marks the beginning of a predictable, customer-centric growth engine — designed for competitiveness beyond peak seasons.

Decision-maker FAQs

(questions only — we’ll tailor answers to your context)

Want a tailored walkthrough and answers?
[Talk to us about this collaboration] — we’ll map your stack, effort, and expected impact in a short working session (retailers and agencies welcome).

For retail & e-commerce leaders

• What level of internal IT/resources will we need during discovery, build, and go-live?
• What benchmarks should we use (conversion, retention, AOV, CLV) to prove this is worth board-level investment?
• How do you quantify the financial upside vs. the operational risk of doing nothing (e.g., abandoned carts, lost loyalty)?
• How do you protect peak stability (rollbacks, surge playbooks, incident comms)?
• How will this integrate with our existing ESP/SMS and attribution stack (Klaviyo, Attentive, GA4, MMM)?
• How much of my internal team’s time is realistically required — and how do you ensure knowledge transfer so we aren’t dependent on you long-term?
• How do you future-proof the solution, so today’s Black Friday app becomes tomorrow’s retention platform, not just another cost center?

For marketing agencies (partner/white-label)

• What benchmarks can we reference to set realistic goals for our client’s board?
• How do we ensure that creative strategy and technical execution reinforce each other, rather than compete for client attention?
• What is the most effective way to demonstrate that investments in CRO, personalization, or new platforms generate measurable revenue impact, not just campaign activity?
• How do we frame a single seasonal win (like Black Friday) as the starting point for a multi-year growth program — positioning the agency as architect of the client’s ecosystem, not a one-off vendor?
• What kind of reporting and insight packages can we deliver under our brand, to position the agency as the orchestrator of growth?