Client Success: How Loomcraft Increased Repeat Orders by 34%

The problem Loomcraft brought to us was not unusual for a growing fashion e-commerce brand: they had customers who bought once, liked the product, and then didn't come back. Not because the product was bad. Because there was no reliable mechanism to bring them back — and the mobile web experience was not compelling enough on its own to earn a second visit.

Ananya Rao, co-founder of Loomcraft, wanted a native app on both iOS and Android. Not as a vanity project, but as a direct channel to their best customers — one that would make reordering faster, keep the brand visible on the home screen, and give them a way to reach users with relevant messages at the right time.

The result: repeat orders up 34% since launch, a 4.8 rating across both stores, and a checkout experience their customers notice.

The Business Problem: Good Product, Weak Repeat Channel

Fashion e-commerce in India is a crowded, competitive category. Customer acquisition costs are real, which means lifetime value is everything. A customer who buys once and then drifts to a competitor or simply forgets about the brand represents a significant acquisition cost that never fully paid back.

Loomcraft's core buyers — women shopping for contemporary Indian and fusion wear — were primarily on mobile. Most of them had bought through the mobile website at least once. The conversion mechanics on mobile web were working well enough to generate first purchases. They weren't working well enough to generate second and third ones.

The gap was structural. Mobile web is good at capturing first-time visitors who arrive from search or social. It is not built for repeat engagement: there's no push channel, no saved payment flow, no personalised home screen, no way to reach a user who closed the browser tab and moved on with their day. A native app addresses all of those gaps at once.

The Approach: React Native on Both Stores, Checkout as the Priority

Why React Native

Loomcraft needed to be on both the App Store and Google Play — their customer base spans both platforms. Building two separate native codebases (Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android) would have roughly doubled the build cost and created two parallel maintenance tracks going forward.

React Native gave them both platforms from a single codebase, with the same engineering team. The app's UI, product catalogue, cart, checkout, and notification logic are all written once and run natively on both platforms. When a new feature ships, it ships to both stores at the same time.

The Features We Prioritised

Not every e-commerce feature made it into version one. The brief was to build what moves the needle on repeat purchases — and to build it well — rather than to build everything. Three features anchored the first release:

1. Checkout that earns the second order

The most important thing a returning customer should be able to do is buy again quickly. We built a checkout flow designed specifically for repeat purchases: biometric authentication on return visits, saved addresses and payment methods pre-filled, UPI intent integration with Razorpay for one-tap payment, and transparent cost display from the cart screen so there are no surprises before the final confirmation.

For a first-time checkout, the flow is still fast — guest checkout is available, account creation happens post-purchase. But for a returning buyer, the entire path from opening the app to order confirmed takes under 60 seconds. That speed is what changed the repeat purchase behaviour.

2. Personalised product surface

Loomcraft's catalogue is large enough that a generic "new arrivals" feed doesn't serve returning customers well. We implemented a home screen that adapts to each user's history: recently viewed items at the top, category-level recommendations based on purchase history, and wishlist items surfaced when there's a price change or low stock alert.

This is not sophisticated machine learning — it's a well-structured rule-based system that uses the data the app generates naturally. A user who has bought kurtas twice in the past three months sees new kurta arrivals first. That relevance is what drives the open-to-browse-to-buy flow that repeat orders depend on.

3. A push notification strategy built for high intent

The notification layer was built from the beginning with Loomcraft's specific use case in mind: reaching customers who have already bought, not converting new ones. The triggers we implemented:

• Cart abandonment reminders (30 minutes after an item is left in cart, with product image and name)
• Wishlist price drop alerts (triggered when a wishlisted item's price changes)
• Restock notifications (triggered when an out-of-stock item the user previously viewed comes back)
• Order status updates (confirmed, dispatched, out for delivery, delivered)

The broadcast notification type — the "check out our new collection" message sent to all users on a schedule — was excluded from version one by design. Those notifications erode permission; the trigger-based ones build the habit of checking the app when something relevant happens.

What the Launch Looked Like

The app shipped to both the App Store and Google Play simultaneously. The rollout was staged — existing Loomcraft web customers were notified first, with an install incentive for early adopters, before broader promotion began.

The 4.8 rating across both stores reflects the checkout experience specifically. The most common theme in early reviews was speed: customers commenting that buying something took "barely a minute" compared to the website. That's the precise signal that drives repeat behaviour — when reordering is fast enough to be low-effort, the barrier to a second purchase drops significantly.

What Actually Drove the 34% Increase in Repeat Orders

The 34% lift in repeat orders was not attributable to a single feature. It came from three compounding effects:

Presence. The app icon on a customer's home screen is a passive brand touchpoint. Users who might have gone two months between mobile web visits were returning to browse within two or three weeks of installing the app — not always to buy, but to see what was new. That browsing habit is the precursor to purchase.

Relevant notifications. Wishlist price drop alerts generated the highest conversion rate of any notification type in the first quarter after launch. Users had already expressed interest in specific items; the notification gave them a reason to act on it. This is fundamentally different from a promotional blast — the intent was pre-existing, and the notification just removed the last friction point.

Checkout speed. The repeat purchase rate is sensitive to how easy the second purchase is. A returning customer who saved their payment details and can check out in under a minute is materially more likely to complete the purchase than one who has to re-enter details, re-authenticate, and navigate a slow mobile web flow. The speed difference between the app checkout and the mobile web checkout is the most direct explanation for the repeat order improvement.

What This Means for Other E-commerce Brands

The Loomcraft result is not specific to fashion. The same mechanics — faster checkout, relevant notifications, a personalised product surface — apply to any e-commerce brand where the customer has a reason to come back and buy again.

The prerequisite is that the product itself earns repeat interest. An app amplifies a customer relationship that already exists; it doesn't create one where the product hasn't done its job. Loomcraft's product was already working. The app gave their existing customers a faster, more convenient way to act on that loyalty.

If your brand is in a category where customers buy more than once — apparel, beauty, food, home goods, accessories — and your mobile web retention is not reflecting that repeat potential, a native app is the most direct intervention available.

FAQ: Building an E-commerce App Like Loomcraft's

How long did the Loomcraft app take to build?

The first version of the app — covering both iOS and Android, with the full product catalogue, cart, checkout, wishlist, push notifications, and order tracking — was delivered and live on both stores within the expected project timeline. The speed was partly a function of React Native's single-codebase architecture and partly a function of having the checkout flow designed and resolved before engineering began.

What backend did the Loomcraft app connect to?

The app integrates with Loomcraft's existing e-commerce backend via API. The product catalogue, inventory, customer accounts, and order management all live in the same system the website uses — the app is a native front-end into that backend, not a parallel data system. This means product updates, pricing changes, and promotions appear in the app automatically.

Can we get a 4.8 store rating from day one?

Not guaranteed, but it's achievable when the fundamentals are right: fast load times, a checkout that doesn't break, and a product surface that reflects what users care about. The reviews that drove Loomcraft's 4.8 rating were primarily about checkout speed. That's an engineering and UX decision, not a luck one.

Our e-commerce brand has a smaller catalogue — is an app still worth it?

Catalogue size is less important than purchase frequency and customer lifetime value. A brand with 200 SKUs and customers who buy four times a year has a stronger case for an app than a brand with 10,000 SKUs whose customers buy once. If repeat purchases are the growth lever you need to pull, a native app is a direct mechanism to pull it.

If your e-commerce brand is generating first purchases but struggling to convert them into a second and third, the gap is likely in the repeat channel — not the product. Talk to the StartupSphare team about building a mobile app that earns that second order as efficiently as Loomcraft's did.

Suggested internal links: Mobile App Development · Success Stories · UI/UX Design · Contact Author: Abdul Rahaman Last updated: August 2026