Why Mobile Matters
Editor's note (updated August 2026): This post originally cited Bravo's 2021 ROI report. It has been refreshed with 2025 numbers. For the full tiered analysis of how pawn shops with a consumer app grow loan balances faster, read the 2025 loan growth data story.
The necessity of providing your customers with a mobile experience isn’t debatable. Consumers now spend well over 100 billion hours a year in mobile shopping apps worldwide.
Research across all industries and company-sizes has produced a wealth of credible data that can be deduced to - if you’re not focusing on mobile, you’re at risk of becoming irrelevant.
Why? Because consumers want a mobile experience and will seek out companies who offer it, leaving their competitors in the dust. 88% of consumers have at least one shopping app on their phone, using shopping apps for a better user experience than just the retailer’s mobile website.
How Mobile Helps You
Moving into the mobile space can be a big step, but the benefits are easy to identify. Mobile apps can improve business performance in three major ways.
Mobile Increases On-time Loan Payments
According to the National Pawnbrokers Association, the number one reason customers default on loans is simply that they forgot about the loan or the due date!
Mobile solutions like text messaging and push notifications allow you to schedule and send automatic loan and payment reminders to customers, and a mobile app makes it easy for customers to make payments anytime, anywhere from their phone.
Imagine a world with no employee time wasted on reminder phone calls or sending ad-hoc messages with payment reminders, and where payments can be accepted around the clock – even when your business is closed.
For a closer look at how after-hours payments prevent defaults, read How After-Hours Payments Quietly Cut Pawn Loan Defaults.
Mobile Increases eCommerce Sales
ECommerce continues to rise, fueling the demand for apps that provide an effortless way for consumers to browse, shop, and buy online.
- Do customers and prospects get consistent text messages promoting your online inventory?
- Can customers and prospects use an app to browse, shop, and buy your items?
- Do they have a way to save items on a Wish List in an app so they can easily purchase later?
If the answer to these questions is “no,” you’re more than likely leaving thousands of dollars on the table, or worse, turning it over to competitors who are using mobile to steal your customers.
Mobile Increases In-Store Traffic
A common fear among retailers is mobile apps will decrease in-store traffic.
Consumers want an online and in-store experience, meaning they want the flexibility to interact with retailers through a variety of channels smoothly (text, email, mobile, in-store, online).
This doesn’t mean they abandon in-store interactions. It just means they don’t want to be limited to that single channel for every type of engagement.
The most innovative retailers use text messaging, emails, and push notifications to send shoppers in-store promos and sales.
Pro tip: Mobile discounts have a 10x higher redemption rate than traditional coupons.
Use mobile as a way to grab consumers’ attention and give them a good reason to visit your store (and bring a friend).
If you’re not convinced by Bravo’s proprietary data, consider this: Walmart found that shoppers who downloaded their app, shop in-store 2.5X more frequently than those without it!
Bravo’s Mastering Mobile
Bravo’s 2025 data compared customers using our mobile solutions to those who are not.
In 2025, customers with MobilePawn:
- Processed 120% more transactions than non-users
- Wrote 1,961 more loans than non-users, an 89% increase
- Received more than 10 million free text notifications from Bravo shops in 2025, an estimated 397,715 phone calls those shops never had to make
And the growth holds across store sizes. Among customers with at least 12 months of tenure, split into three account-size tiers, MobilePawn users showed higher median loan growth in every tier while inventory balances grew less in every tier, a sign of inventory converting into loans and cash instead of sitting on the shelf. You can read the full tiered analysis in our 2025 loan growth data story.
How would it impact your cash flow, interest and revenue if you experienced an uptick in your loans and in-store sales by even 20%?
Brand new to the Bravo product lineup, the Buya App takes the power of MobilePawn and expands to encompass retailers beyond the pawn space. The Buya App allows customers to chat, view account information, make payments and shop at anytime from anywhere and meet the growing consumer demand for convenience and remote accessibility.
Make The Move To Mobile
The appetite for mobile channels from consumers continues to grow and grow rapidly. While the shift toward mobile might feel intimidating, it presents so many notable opportunities for growth for independent retailers.
Consumers of independent retailers have long been underserved as it relates to having access to relevant technology. Bravo makes it easy to tackle the mobile space, differentiate yourself from your from competitors, delight customers and improve employee experience, all while increasing loans, layaways, on-time payment, redemption rates, in-store traffic, and online sales. What’s not to love?