A web-only storefront was starting to cost Payhip customers
Payhip is an e-commerce platform that lets creators sell digital products and courses directly to their audience, with website integration and a built-in storefront. As the platform grew, sellers wanted faster access to revenue data and an easier way to check sales performance without sitting at a desktop.
Payhip's product was web-only, so merchants had no fast path to real-time transaction data or notifications. That gap mattered because rival platforms had already shipped mobile apps, and Payhip risked losing sellers to competitors who could tell them about a sale the moment it happened. Payhip decided to close the gap and partnered with development agency Pagepro to design, build, and ship a cross-platform mobile app.
Choosing a stack for a five-week MVP timeline
Pagepro's team set a hard constraint from the start: ship an MVP focused on real-time transaction insights, in five weeks, without boxing Payhip into a rewrite later. That constraint shaped every tool they picked.
They built on React Native for a single, component-based codebase that could target iOS and Android at once, then layered Expo on top to remove native-project setup and infrastructure work from the critical path. TypeScript added compile-time type checking to cut down on runtime errors, and NativeWind brought Tailwind's utility-first styling into React Native so the UI came together faster and stayed visually consistent across screens.
How Expo tools shaped the day-to-day build
Expo's pre-configured tooling meant Pagepro's engineers spent their five weeks on Payhip's actual features rather than on native module wiring, platform-specific UI theming, or app-signing and store-distribution setup. Expo is also React Native's officially recommended toolchain, which made it the default starting point for the project.
For distributing test builds, the team used EAS Build and wired it into a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline so the client and QA could get new builds without manual handoffs. Where a package needed custom native code that the standard Expo Go sandbox couldn't run, they used a custom development client, which let engineers test those features without rebuilding a full production binary for every change.
On the library side, expo-auth-session handled OAuth 2.0 login and session management, expo-notifications gave the team one API for push notifications on both platforms, expo-secure-store protected sensitive data using the iOS Keychain and Android Keystore, and expo-router brought file-based routing to the app. Expo Router was new to the team on this project. It took some adjustment, but it let them build the web and mobile experience from a single repository, similar to how Next.js structures routes.
What Payhip has to show for it
The MVP shipped in five weeks and is live on both the Android and iOS app stores today. Building from a single React Native and Expo codebase let Payhip and Pagepro deploy to both platforms without maintaining two separate native builds, which the team credits with saving development time and cost compared to building each platform natively.
Payhip expects the app to improve user engagement and retention over time, and, alongside that, to help the platform's operational efficiency and competitive position. Those effects are still forward-looking. Early user feedback after launch has already pointed to specific next features, including blogging tools and richer buyer information display.
What Payhip is building next
Payhip isn't stopping at the MVP. The roadmap includes improving app performance, reducing app size, and expanding test coverage for stability, with the longer-term goal of moving the full Payhip marketplace onto mobile so it's fully usable on both desktop and phone.
For a team evaluating the same path, Payhip's build points to a specific pattern: pick a stack that lets you defer native complexity until you actually need it, and use OTA updates for the JavaScript layer so early iteration doesn't wait on app store review turnaround. Keeping the SDK and dependencies current, and wiring CI/CD in from day one, are the two habits Pagepro's team called out as worth adopting early rather than retrofitting later.
Sources
Payhip boosts seller experience with Expo-powered mobile app (2024-10-08)
