Every DTC brand obsesses over email. Most have finally taken SMS seriously. Almost none have done anything meaningful with push. That gap is one of the cheapest opportunities left in ecommerce retention, and it stays open mostly because brands misunderstand what push is actually for.
Here's what makes it unusual. Push costs effectively nothing per message. There's no per-send fee like SMS, no inbox to fight through, and no deliverability score quietly deciding whether your message gets seen. Most importantly, it captures people who will never give you an email address or a phone number. A shopper who won't fill in a form will often click "Allow" without a second thought, and that shopper is otherwise invisible to you forever.
That's the real argument for push: it reaches an audience your other channels structurally cannot.
The opt-in is everything. This is where most brands ruin the channel before it starts. They enable the native browser prompt, it fires the instant someone lands on the homepage, the shopper reflexively hits "Block," and that's permanent. You don't get a second chance at a browser permission.
The fix is a two-step approach. Show a branded, on-brand primer first, explaining what the shopper gets: restock alerts, early access to drops, price-drop notifications. Only when they say yes to your primer do you trigger the real browser prompt. Opt-in rates on a well-designed two-step setup dramatically outperform the blunt instant prompt, and you preserve the option for everyone who says "not now."
Timing matters too. Asking someone to accept notifications three seconds into their first visit is asking for commitment before you've given them a reason. Trigger it after they've shown intent: viewed a couple of products, spent real time on a page, added something to cart.
What push is genuinely good at. Not everything. Push is short, it's interruptive, and it has no room for storytelling. Use it where immediacy is the whole value:
Back-in-stock alerts, which are close to the highest-intent message in ecommerce.
Price-drop alerts on products a shopper actually viewed.
Cart and browse abandonment, as a fast, low-cost recovery layer.
Drops, launches, and restocks where speed decides who gets the product.
Final-hours urgency on a sale that's about to close.
What push is bad at is long-form persuasion and daily promotional noise. Send too often and people don't unsubscribe politely the way they do with email. They disable notifications at the browser level, and you lose them permanently. Frequency discipline isn't optional here.
Getting the balance right is why a growing number of brands hand web push notifications to a specialist rather than treating it as a plugin someone toggles on and forgets about.
Coordinate, don't compete. Push works best as the safety net inside a coordinated lifecycle. A shopper abandons a cart. The email lands and goes unopened. They're not on your SMS list. A push notification the following morning is the only remaining way to recover that sale, and it costs you nothing to send. That's the compounding logic: push isn't another megaphone, it's the channel that catches what the others miss.
Segment it like any other channel. The lazy version of push is a single broadcast to everyone who ever clicked "Allow," and that's precisely how you train people to block you. The browser hands you behavioral data, so use it. Target by the product someone actually viewed, what they left sitting in the cart, the category they keep browsing, and how recently they visited. A restock alert sent only to the people who looked at that exact product feels like a service. The identical message sent to your entire subscriber base feels like spam, and it gets treated accordingly.
Measure opt-in rate, click-through, revenue attributed to push, and, just as importantly, your opt-out and block rates as an early-warning system that you're pushing too hard.
This is exactly how BMO Media approaches it. Push is built into the retention ecosystem alongside email, SMS, loyalty, reviews, and subscriptions, sharing the same customer data and the same frequency rules, so it strengthens the journey instead of adding noise to it. For a channel that costs almost nothing to run, that's a remarkable amount of revenue most brands are still leaving on the table.
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