ConsultMyApp: UK retail App Store search wars (AliExpress owns the front door, Very shows up everywhere)
A credited summary of ConsultMyApp’s UK retail Apple Ads analysis across generic, non-brand shopping intent. The big point: ‘retail app’ is basically irrelevant, intent clusters behave wildly differently, and the winners are the ones who understand where the auction is actually retail-relevant.
Original article (source): ConsultMyApp - “The UK Retail App Search Wars: AliExpress owns the front door, and Very seems to be everywhere” (June 5, 2026)
The headline
UK retail Apple Ads is not “one market”. It is a bunch of smaller intent fights, and the obvious-sounding keywords are often a trap.
ConsultMyApp used APPlyzer to look at UK iPhone search demand + search scores + the full Apple Ads auction results (positions #1 to #5) across generic, non-brand retail queries.
What they found (the parts worth stealing)
- “Retail app” is a junk keyword. They cite ~33 estimated daily UK searches for “retail app”, versus ~9,927 for “shop”. The point is not the exact number, it is the mindset: users search for what they want, not your internal category labels.
- AliExpress “owns the front door” on broad shopping intent. They call out top-slot wins on terms like shop, shopping, online shopping, buy online.
- Very is the persistent cross-category player. Not always #1, but it shows up across a wide spread (shopping, fashion, footwear, furniture, beauty-adjacent, resale-adjacent).
- Mytheresa is the surprise aggressor. It shows up beyond pure luxury, and they say it took 10 position-one wins across the set, the most frequent top-slot winner overall.
- Fashion is fragmented by intent. They highlight different “winners” for different slices (for example, clothes shopping vs jeans vs dresses vs menswear). The takeaway is campaign structure needs real clustering, not one big “fashion” bucket.
- Resale is a clean battleground now. They show a pretty crisp split by intent (used clothes, vintage, marketplace, sell clothes, etc.), which is a signal that resale is no longer a side category.
- Grocery queries bleed into delivery intent. Supermarkets can win clean “grocery” terms, but delivery apps dominate broader “food delivery” style intent. That overlap is where the risk is.
- Home and electronics need ruthless keyword selection. A lot of high-volume product words in the App Store skew to utilities/games (camera, paint, DIY, etc.), so retail bids can end up paying for the wrong job-to-be-done.
Why this matters
This is a solid reminder that search intent does most of the work in Apple Ads. Volume is not enough. If the auction is full of non-retail apps, your “retail keyword” is just an expensive misunderstanding.
Tiny win
Take 30 minutes and build a one-page “intent map” for your category:
- list 15 to 25 generic, non-brand queries you think matter
- for each, check the top organic results and ad slots #1 to #5
- label each query as clean retail vs polluted (utilities/games/tools)
Then only expand budgets or add CPP variants for the clean clusters. You will cut wasted spend without needing a new bidding model.
Read the original: https://www.consultmyapp.com/blog/uk-retail-app-search-wars-apple-ads
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