Shoppers are not always browsing in your app. They switch tabs, open other apps, and close your app once they have finished shopping. Push notifications are how you reach them anyway, whether that's on the lock screen, in the browser, or inside your mobile app. These personalized messages can be anything, from order updates, seller messages, cart reminders, price drop alerts, winning auctions, outbid notifications, or back-in-stock alerts that pull them back before intent fades.
For digital commerce platforms, that reach is not optional. Cart abandonment runs promotional windows (limited-time offers, product recommendations) that have a short LTV (life-time-value), and transactional push notifications (shipping, delivery, receipts) ensure your customers receive the information they need quickly and accurately.
Keep reading for how push notifications work under the hood, which notification types actually move revenue, and how to implement push notifications in eCommerce in a way you can measure and enhance the user experience to help improve conversion rates.
How push notifications work in eCommerce
Push notifications are real-time messages sent by a website or from mobile devices to users who have opted in. They show up as banners, alerts, or badges, even when the shopper is not actively in e-commerce apps.
At a high level, the flow looks like this:
User opt-in: The shopper grants permission in the browser (web push) or mobile app (iOS/Android) to receive rich push notifications.
Token assignment: The device receives a unique token, commonly FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) on Android and APNs (Apple Push Notifications) on iOS. Your backend then stores it against that user or session while the token is still live.
Notification trigger: Your eCommerce platform (or a connected service) decides an event warrants a push: order shipped, cart idle, price drop, seller message, and so on.
Delivery: A push notification service routes the payload to the device, which displays it as an in-app message.
While web push notifications rely on browser permission and service workers, mobile push goes through Apple and Google gateways, which can make things more complicated for your backend. Most digital stores implement both to ensure these important notifications reach all of your audiences. Treating them as one generic message or disregarding them, thinking your users will always be shopping in your app, is a common reason campaigns underperform.
Types of eCommerce push notifications that drive revenue
Push notifications are an invaluable way to inform your customers of new information or sales to bring them back to the product page on your platform. Sending the right notification maps the intent to clear business outcomes, as well as ensuring that your customers have a clear understanding of what they are trying to do back in your app.
Promotional notifications
Designed to drive urgency, these notifications highlight flash sales, limited-time discounts, and seasonal campaigns. Time-sensitive language (“ends tonight,” “low stock”) helps boost click-through rates (CTR) and enhances engagement, as many users may click on the promotion even if they are not in the market for anything special.
Example: “50% off ends in 3 hours. Shop your wishlist.”
Transactional notifications
Order confirmations, shipping updates, and delivery alerts earn the highest open rates because they answer a question the customer is already asking. When it's all contained within your platform, they should be wired to your order management system (OMS) to track order status and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to personalize messages based on customer data, offering updates like real-time delivery tracking and order summaries, ensuring timely, accurate, and relevant communication that enhances customer experience and operational efficiency, all while ensuring your opt-in rate for push notifications doesn’t drop.
Example: “You've won the bid for the Pokémon TCG Charizard! View the listing here.”
Personalized recommendations
Suggestions based on browse history, purchase history, or loyalty tier perform best when tied to real behavior events. Today, AI algorithms analyze this user interaction data to provide relevant recommendations, helping increase conversion chances by retargeting different audiences based on the recommendations.
Example: “Customers recommend this denim jacket based on your previous purchase of blue jeans.”
Abandoned cart reminders
With abandonment rates often cited around 70%, abandoned cart push notifications remain one of the highest-ROI lifecycle enhancements. Product imagery, clear CTAs (call-to-actions), and optional incentives (“complete checkout for 10% off”) can significantly improve conversions while the product is still fresh.
Example: “Still thinking about those sneakers? Your cart is saved.”
Price drop and back-in-stock alerts
Wishlist and notify-me flows turn passive interest into conversions. Back-in-stock pushes are especially valuable for limited runs and seasonal SKUs where demand spikes the moment inventory returns.
Examples: “Your watch dropped 20%.” / “The laptop you wanted is back in stock.”
Loyalty, reviews, and re-engagement
Points balance updates, review requests with small incentives, and win-back offers for dormant users are key to loyalty programs. These support lifetime value more than first purchasers, boosting customer lifetime value (CLV).
Example: "You earned 200 bonus points! Redeem them now for exclusive discounts."
Best practices before you scale sends
While push notifications are key to ensuring customers return to your platform, you also want to ensure you don't overload your users with unnecessary notifications to the point where they opt out of mobile app push notifications, uninstall your app, or delete their account. It is a delicate balance to improve customer satisfaction and increase customer engagement.
Relevance and segmentation: Send based on behavior, location, and channel preference rather than one global list.
Timing: Test send windows for when your users are most active. Promotional pushes at 2 a.m. train users to ignore you, rather than engage.
Frequency: More pushes rarely mean more revenue, as they often mean more unsubscribes from annoyed customers.
Copy and CTAs: Short, specific, action-oriented lines outperform vague messaging.
Rich media: Images, GIFs, and emojis can lift engagement when they match the message (e.g., product shot on a cart reminder).
Localization: Translate and adapt offers for regional storefronts or based on language preferences.
A/B testing: Subject line, creative, delay, and incentive are all (and should be) testable.
Push notification opt-in should be explicit, easy to understand, and paired with granular preferences (promos vs. transactional vs. back-in-stock). This supports trust, GDPR-style consent requirements, and long-term list health.
How to implement push notifications in eCommerce Apps
Implementing push notifications is really three decisions: which surfaces you want to support, what triggers each should send, and how you connect those triggers..
Choose your surfaces (web, mobile, in-app)
| Surface | Best for | Typical stack |
|---|---|---|
| Web push notifications | Desktop shoppers, remarketing, flash promos | Service worker + browser push API via a vendor |
| Mobile push notifications | iOS/Android apps, high-intent retention | APNs + FCM through a push notification platform or SDK |
| In-app notifications | Active sessions, live order status in the app | Real-time messaging layer + in-app UI |
If you only sell through a Shopify storefront today, you may start with a plugin tied to web push. If you have a native app, plan for dual registration (web token and device token for the same user) and an identity strategy so you do not double-message.
Pick a push notification service (and know what it does not do)
Common push notification services include FCM, APNs, OneSignal, and Airship. They excel at device registration, payload formatting, and delivery to Apple/Google gateways.
What they typically do not own is the real-time event fabric inside your product: cart updates, payment captures, shipment scans, and inventory stock notices. Those events often live in your backend, OMS, or a pub/sub layer.
As previously mentioned, push notifications normally work by having your application register user devices. A service provider will then deliver messages to these registered or certified devices that use your application. To be able to use these service providers in your application to deliver push notifications, you would have to integrate each framework into your application. This means that you’ll need to include the extra libraries, SDKs, and code handling for each type of device that you want to send push notifications.
This is where PubNub can help, as we are both this real-time layer and a way to send push notifications to both iOS and Android devices at the same time, without any additional libraries.
PubNub supports push notifications with the same SDK that you normally use to integrate your application with PubNub’s real-time messaging. Since the application has already registered the device, you just need to provide the push registration token and format the message payload, which contains a reserved section for push notifications. You can then add your iOS, Android, and web notifications in one call, without needing to depend on the frameworks and libraries of the other services - all you need to do is include information in the payload, and let PubNub handle the rest.
Wire PubNub for event-driven eCommerce notifications
Normally, the first step to use push notifications is to get set up with the provider services. To do this, developers register their app with the necessary push notification services for their target platforms. They ensure that user devices that install their app also register with that service to receive notifications. Then, it’s just a matter of sending the notifications, which have two parts: getting the information that will go into your notification, then sending the notification itself to the desired endpoint, whether it’s a desktop device, browser, or mobile app.
PubNub simplifies this process into a single, seamless activity and makes it easy to automatically align your in-app and push activity. With our solutions for mobile push notifications, you don’t need to develop push notifications separately from in-app alerts or activity. Instead, our easy-to-use APIs let you automatically trigger push notifications from real-time messages for users who are offline, or have simply put your app in the background.
With PubNub, it’s easy to get push notifications up and running in your app. Our in-depth documentation walks you through each step, but the essential steps are as follows:
Register your app with APNs for iOS devices and FCM for Android Devices.
Enable the mobile push gateway feature for your app in the PubNub Admin Portal and upload your FCM API Key and/or the APNS Certification.
When users install your app, register that device with its respective push notification provider and obtain a device token for that device from APNs or FCM.
In the client-side application code using that SDK, register the device with specific PubNub channels using the device token.
Implement code to receive push notifications. Follow in-depth walk-throughs for both platforms on setting up notifications, from start to finish.
Send your push notifications by formatting the payload to meet the needs of your targeted platforms when something meaningful happens—
order.shipped,cart.abandoned,wishlist.back_in_stock, etc.
After you send your message, let PubNub handle the rest! PubNub lets you define the contents of your push notification right alongside your real-time messages, so you don’t have to spend additional development time just to set up alerts, and you don’t have to worry about keeping them in sync and accurate to in-app activity. Instead, with a single message, you can reach both active and out-of-app users with engaging, relevant content.
Follow along with our Android Kotlin Tutorial or iOS Swift Tutorial if you would like to follow a detailed, step-by-step guide on adding push notifications using PubNub.
If you need a more personalized, detailed architecture review, you can always talk to our team directly.
Measuring success, common challenges, and practical fixes
Sending more push notifications with the intent to improve sales is neither a successful nor smart strategy. It's better to track baselines per notification type, channel, and cohort in your analytics stack (GA4, Amplitude, etc.) with UTMs or deep links on every CTA.
You'll want to ensure that you are properly investigating and making sure your notifications are actually improving customer retention, not driving your users away.
Judge pushes on delivery rates, opens, CTR, conversion, opt-outs, and revenue per send, not clicks alone.
Break down every report by notification type, channel, send timing, and customer segment. Ensure you are A/B testing each variable for shared visibility into sends, failures, and token health.
When CTR drops, and opt-outs climb, tighten frequency, separate promos from transactional sends, and make preferences easy to control. Honor opt-out on the token the moment a user says no, but attempt to understand why that user has decided to opt-out of notifications so you can improve messaging.
Treat measurement and these guardrails as part of the product, not a post-launch checklist. Push then becomes a channel you can scale with confidence instead of one you have to walk back after an unsuccessful campaign.
What's next?
Push notifications are one of the few channels that meet shoppers where they already are: outside your site or on their phone. Used well, they recover carts, reinforce trust with transactional updates, and give lifecycle marketing a timely edge. Used poorly, they are spam with an API.
You can learn more about how PubNub can support push notifications for your real-time eCommerce platform, along with the thousands of customers that depend on PubNub for a variety of use cases. You can sign up for a free PubNub account once you are ready to get started by following our in-depth documentation to build or integrate the features you need.
Talk to our team when you are ready to review architecture, TCO, and a phased rollout before your next peak season.
