The Hidden Costs of Long-Term Maintenance for Your eCommerce Mobile App—and How to Turn Them Into Growth

Your eCommerce app is more than just a launch; it is a continual investment that requires continual maintenance. How expensive are the maintenance costs for your app? Most business owners overlook the maintenance costs associated with app updates, app security, engagement tools for users, and unforeseen tech debts that can diminish your return on investment. Here, we will examine these maintenance costs and show how using modern, strategic maintenance, which can include no-code platforms like Twinr, can help leverage growth.

Long-Term Maintenance and App Mobile Maintenance Is Not Optional

Your eCommerce mobile app is not a project that has zero costs once built and deployed. It is an asset that requires constant updates to ensure the app relevance, security, and operational excellence. It is concerning to see so many mobile app executive teams focus on the initial development costs, while seemingly ignoring the ongoing costs which are pivotal to the health of the app. The consequences of this are to see an app stagnate, experience loss of engagement and ultimately revenue loss.

Are you aware that many eCommerce executives are surprised when they learn that app maintenance takes 15-20% of their initial development budget every year? (Statista). If you let it, this long-term investment will erode your competitive advantage, increase customer turnover, increase the risk of debts, and reduce your profitability.

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What Does Long-Term Maintenance Actually Include?

Maintaining an eCommerce app is more complex than simply fixing bugs or updating the interface. Maintenance includes an ongoing series of strategic activities that guarantees sustained profitability and continued customer engagement with your app. These activities include:

1. Strategic Updates & Innovations

Customer tastes are fickle and old functionalities will quickly lose their charm. Modern payment functionality, streamlined checkout, and tailored recommendation systems are just a few of the functionalities that require persistent attention. An feature-rich app will help you capture and keep customers in an ever more competitive marketplace.

2. Platform & SDK Updates

Both iOS and Android platforms push quarterly OS upgrades. Updated security features and third-party software development kits (SDKs). Ensuring your app meets these requirements is crucial to mitigating potential weaknesses and avoiding app rejection by software distributors.

3. Bug Fixes & Stability Improvements

Despite the best pre-launch testing, some bugs will always find their way into the system after the system is live. Your regular bug fixes will help reduce the impact on user experience, reduce crashes, and improve brand reputation.

4. User Engagement & Retention Strategies

It’s a fact not widely known that retaining a customer is far cheaper than acquiring one. Strategies that include push notifications, in-app loyalty programs, personalized interactions, and deep analytic capabilities provide a positive return on investment and improve customer retention and repeat purchases.

5. Performance Optimization

With every increase in user numbers, higher expectations will come on the app’s infrastructure. Regularly increasing the server’s capacity, improving loading times, and removing bloat from the app will improve user satisfaction, conversion rates, and increase retention.

6. Compliance & Security

With the introduction of privacy and data laws such as GDPR and CCPA, businesses must routinely assess and update their systems. Fines and reputation-damaging data breaches are inevitable if such measures are not taken.

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How Much Does It Cost? A Breakdown of Long-Term App Maintenance

Experts in the field suggest putting aside about 15 to 20 percent of your initial app development costs every year to account for maintenance costs.

For Example

• Development Cost = $150,000
• Annual Maintenance Cost = $22,500–$30,000 (15-20%) for maintenance

Maintained over three to five years, the maintenance costs can double the initial investment, or even triple it in case it’s not managed well.

Sources Used

• Statista states that maintenance costs of an app are within the range of 15-20% of initial development costs every year.
• McKinsey’s research shows that companies that roll out app updates regularly see user retention increase by 50%.
• Apps that are not stagnant generate 30-50% more revenue than stagnant ones, as reported by Shopify.

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The Unexpected Hidden Costs That Erode Your ROI

Cost implications and the potential losses that can accrue in eCommerce are often ignored by leading entrepreneurs:

• Technical Debt: Quick temporary fixes that get implemented add up over time, and costly refactoring will be needed as a result. (Gartner states that resolving technical debt for legacy systems will eat up 50-70% of the initial development costs).
• Scaling Infrastructure: When user growth accelerates quickly, it can lead to unplanned increases in the size of your servers and databases, leading to unexpected and unplanned costs.
• Churn Due to Outdated Features: Users disengage and move away from an application when it doesn’t have regular updates. There can even be more than a 25% drop in retention when updates are delayed.
• Regulatory Compliance and Policy Changes: Outdated or delayed policies can lead to fines and removal from the app store, leading to even more expensive problems.

These long-term ramifications will hamper your app’s profitability and position it as a liability instead.

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Poor Maintenance Undermines Your Revenue and Growth

Your app becomes outdated, disengaged, and unprofitable without a regular maintenance schedule. Increased retention of customers by a mere 5% can lead to a profit increase of 25-95% according to McKinsey. Outdated apps do the reverse by losing customers and reducing profitability, negatively impacting repeat purchase and customer lifetime value.

Having an app that isn’t changing or improving leaves you vulnerable. Competitors who innovate and improve more quickly will encourage your customers to leave and look for alternatives. If you don’t improve the ongoing health of your app, you will waste your development dollars.

The bottom line is the health of your app will need continual maintenance and it will not merely be an expense, it will be a strategic driver of value.

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Strategies to reduce long-term costs and improve your ROI.

The good news is that maintenance costs, while growing an app, can be handled with strategies, automation, and modern tools.

1. Use No-Code Tools, such as Twinr.

Wouldn’t it be great to easily convert websites into native apps? Businesses can easily do that with Twinr. This helps in shortening development cycles and costs related to your app’s ongoing updates and maintenance. With the ease of incorporating new features, your app can also improve to meet changing industry standards.

2. Engagement and Personalization

Building tools to improve user retention, such as personalized experiences, reminder notifications and loyalty programs, is a great investment. Use analytics to identify features that are super useful and focus on improving them continually.

3. Streamline Your Routine Maintenance Tasks

Instead of thinking about what is needed to sustain the everyday activities on your app, think of what is necessary to develop your app and grow the business. In the case of Twinr, it helps to automate the synchronization of your app with the most recent native OS standards.

4. Integrate and Collaborate with Experts to Ensure Progress

App maintenance, no-code development, and collaboration can successfully fasten the accumulation of technical debt, improve the iteration cycle, and keep your app aligned with changing users’ needs.

5. Emphasize Retention

Focus on features that improve lifetime value, and decrease churn. Invest in the overall UI/UX to keep it contemporary and to stave off churn driven by a sense of obsolescence.

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Cost of Adding Value

Preventing potential losses is a part of app maintenance. The value is ongoing revenue.

Quick facts:

• Keeping users engaged with the app will return 30%-50% more return on ad spend (ROAS) (Shopify).
• Retention value will enhance customer lifetime value by 20-30% with your maintenance updates.
• Maintenance task automation will improve your operational costs by 40% in a year.

Think of every dollar used for maintenance as an investment. You gain back that money through repeat customers, increased conversion rates, and reduced risks in operations.