Shopora: Building a React Native E-commerce App

The brief: a storefront built for phones

Shopora was built for an online retailer under NDA with a broad catalogue - consumer electronics, fashion, home and accessories. Most of its shoppers were on mobile, and the mobile web store made it hard to find deals, slow to check out and easy to forget once a tab was closed.

The brief had three parts: help shoppers find the right product in a wide catalogue, make checkout fast and trustworthy, and give them a reason to come back after the first order.

What the app does

• A personalised home feed with seasonal sales, flash deals and trending items.
• Fast product search and browsing across categories.
• A wishlist to save items for later.
• Secure checkout with Stripe in a few taps.
• Order tracking from warehouse to doorstep.
• Push notifications when prices drop on wishlisted products.

Helping shoppers find products in a wide catalogue

A broad catalogue is a strength until a shopper has to dig through it. Shopora approaches discovery from two directions. For shoppers who are browsing, the home feed puts sales, flash deals and trending items first. For shoppers who know what they want, search and category browsing get them there directly.

Feed sections are configured on the backend rather than hard-coded, so the retailer can change what is promoted - a seasonal sale, a new category - without shipping an app update.

Mobile checkout with Stripe

Checkout is where mobile purchases are lost. Long forms, unfamiliar payment screens and any doubt about security all push shoppers to abandon their cart. Shopora uses Stripe's native payment sheet, which gives shoppers a familiar, secure checkout in a few taps and keeps card details off the retailer's own servers entirely.

Prices and totals are always confirmed by the backend before payment, so a price that changed while an item sat in the cart is never charged at the old amount.

Wishlists and price-drop notifications

Not every visit ends in a purchase, and that is fine if the shopper comes back. The wishlist gives people a way to say "not yet" without losing the item. When the price of a wishlisted product drops, the app sends a push notification - a message the shopper actually wants, which is the best kind of re-engagement.

Timing the push permission request matters. Asking on first launch, before the shopper has seen any value, is the fastest way to get a no. Asking when someone adds their first item to the wishlist ties the request to a clear benefit.

Order tracking after the purchase

Once an order is placed, the most common question is "where is it?". Shopora shows each order's progress from warehouse to doorstep, which answers the question before it becomes a support email and keeps the app on the shopper's home screen between purchases.

Stack and approach

The app is built in React Native with TypeScript and NativeWind on top of a shared design system, so every screen - feed, product, cart, checkout, orders - uses the same components. That consistency is what makes a large app feel coherent, and it is what keeps adding the next screen cheap.

For the trade-offs behind choosing React Native, see React Native vs native.

What we would do differently

We would instrument the full shopping funnel - product views, add to cart, checkout started, purchase - in the very first build. An e-commerce app's most important questions are about where shoppers drop off, and those questions can only be answered with data collected from launch day.

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