Since the emergence of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in 2015, companies like Twitter, Uber, Instagram, and Lancôme have taken the most significant advantages of this technology. With a blend of highly engaging user experience and a new user base, PWAs come with minimal development costs.
The eCommerce giant Alibaba reported a 76% increase in total conversions across browsers. In addition, the brand used a feature called “Add to Home Screen”, which brought a 300% increase in engagement rate from frequent visitors.
Being an eCommerce store owner, if you want to take plenty of advantages of PWA technology like the eCommerce giants like Alibaba, then you’re at the right place. In this article, we’ll cover PWA, its benefits, and why PWA is the future technology for eCommerce stores.
Let’s dive right in.
What is a PWA?
A progressive web app is a type of application software built using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebAssembly. It has the feel and functionality of an actual native application. But, wait! You must think about what do by native apps mean? It is a software application built in a specific programming language for a particular device platform, either iOS or Android.
In addition, developers also use static site generators such as Gatsby or VuePress to launch highly engaging PWA storefronts. And these frameworks can easily be connected to eCommerce platforms on the backend.
After introducing PWA, Twitter could deliver a robust experience with instant loading, user engagement, and lower data consumption. This is what Twitter experienced after introducing PWAs, as per a Google report:
- 65% increase in pages per session
- 20% decrease in bounce rate
- 75% increase in Tweets sent
Simply put, PWAs are:
Fast
Customers leave when the website is slow. As a result, businesses can miss out on a massive opportunity for potential sales. PWAs load extremely fast. It also responds rapidly to user interactions. Hence, the improved performance of a website or app positively affects the conversions, user experience, and retention rates.
Reliable
They load instantly, regardless of the network speed. Also, they eliminate dependence on a network connection. It also ensures an instant and reliable user experience, despite inadequate or nonexistent internet connections.
Moving ahead, let’s know more about the features of PWA.
PWAs run in the browser but offers users the experience of a native app through key features such as:
- Push notifications: It can keep your customers interested and motivated in your eCommerce products and services only if it is used as a good part of a messaging strategy.
- Responsive & browser compatibility: They are built to fit all types of screens. No matter where the user accesses it, a PWA is adaptable to every kind of device such as desktops, tablets, mobile, etc.
- Discoverability & easy installation: Such apps can be shared via URL; therefore, they are easily found. The installation is easy and entails visiting a site and adding it to a device’s home screen.
- App-like Interface: It has capabilities like mimicking navigation and interactions of native apps.
- Self-updates: Able to update automatically, so that apps stay fresh.
- Safety: Such apps are served through HTTPs, so unauthorized users can’t access their content.
Benefits of Using PWA with eCommerce Store
According to the report, mobile web commerce is expected to generate 44.2% of all total retail eCommerce sales by 2025. Simply put, the mobile share of eCommerce is rapidly growing.
Undeniably, businesses are looking for the best ways to get their share of the mobile eCommerce market.
With PWAs, it is now possible for businesses to get the same functionalities with PWAs.
Speed & accessibility
Here’re a few vital statistics:
- 53% of online shoppers expect e-commerce pages to load in 3 seconds or less.
- 21% of consumers say slow-loading pages are their main source of dissatisfaction when shopping online.
Undoubtedly, fast loading speed is essential, and PWAs are designed for smooth and speedy user experiences. The apps work even offline or with a slow internet connection.
Better conversions
PWAs provide a better user experience for customers, and a better user experience means higher conversion rates and interaction rates. For example, Alibaba saw a 76% increase in conversions across different browsers after introducing PWAs.
Reduced development cost & time
A native app requires development and maintenance. To reach the same audience, it’s essential to create both Android and Apple iOS apps.
How does it work with eCommerce?
Now you’ve gone through a few of the important benefits of using the PWA storefront with your eCommerce store. Following are PWA examples to consider:
Gatsby
A popular framework, Gatsby, is used for building static PWA sites with React. With excellent documentation and a strong community of developers, Gatsby is the ultimate choice for developing eCommerce apps. It lets developers build websites and apps rapidly.
Vue Storefront
One of the fastest-growing platform-agnostic PWAs, Vue Storefront, can be used with most eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce. Vue Storefront has rapidly growing popularity with increasing numbers of stars on Github. In addition, the Vue Storefront Slack channel has over 1200 members.
Deity
A popular PWA platform, Deity is a micro-services-oriented platform. It is based on the modular approach to solving enterprise PWA requirements. Therefore, it can be leveraged with various frontends.
Deity Falcon allows businesses of all sizes to offer scalable, robust web and mobile experiences to their users.
Reasons: Why is PWA the future of eCommerce?
Approximately half of the web traffic worldwide has come up with mobile phones. In the fourth quarter of 2021, mobile devices generated 54.4% of global website traffic, according to Statista. Such figures are essential for merchants to provide the best shopping experience to engage their audience.
While mobile traffic is growing, conversions are not. With the emergence of thousands of eCommerce sites not adopting this technology yet can mean missing out on rare and exciting opportunities to get ahead of the competition.
Following are the top reasons which you need to consider if you are looking forward to a new eCommerce store:
1. Boost User Engagement with Push Notifications
PWA offers capabilities like sending push notifications to mobile devices similar to a native app. As a result, businesses can reach their audience where they have the most of such mobile devices. This way, they can create highly engaging user experiences.
With instant notifications and small messages, brands significantly impact the audience. It also allows them to grab their attention. If we compare it to traditional marketing, such as emails, they appear directly on a person’s phone. As a result, they also stand out from the crowd.
Push notifications of PWAs are more than simple text messages. It includes one or two call-to-action buttons and references a product or service with a promotional image.
Moreover, according to the Google report, Lancome saw an increase in their conversion rates via push notifications after building Progressive Web App, from 8%-12%.
2. Reduced Development Cost & Time-to-market
PWA eliminates the need for the development, maintenance, and marketing of any platform other than the PWA website. Since PWA comes with ready-to-use solutions, it costs less than the custom ones. The reduced consumption of resources is the main reason behind this. The ready-made solutions shorten the process and prepare for different technologies.
Put simply, PWAs provide a unique opportunity to serve all channels from one platform, which is built, maintained, and serviced by one team. Progressive Web Application development services reduce cost and time-to-market dramatically while still providing the same user experience and capabilities to all customers.
3. Improves SEO
Since PWA is web-based and everything is discoverable by search engines content within a PWA can be easily shared and ranked by Google and Bing. In contrast, native apps aren’t allowed to be crawled by search engine robots. PWAs offer the advantages like super-fast loading times, reduced bouncing rates, minimum data usage, and highly engaging experiences. It has become the default booster for SEO rankings. If it is done correctly, Google will rank a well-designed PWA higher than any regular website.
When it comes to technical SEO, PWAs are the best option . They make use of the flexibility of JavaScript, which means Google sees the single published page as a JavaScript site. Therefore, Google crawls PWA sites like it crawls AJAX or JavaScript sites. However, the ability of search engines to correctly discover crawl has historically been poor. Fortunately, there is nothing to worry about with PWAs. So, PWAs with exemplary architecture get the top SEO rankings they deserve.
4. Add to the Home Screen (A2HS)
As we’ve already discussed, PWAs provide a highly engaging user experience with the same capabilities as native apps. In addition, They can be installed on the home screen, making them directly accessible to users.
PWAs have already made the process of downloading as simple as visiting a web link and accepting a prompt. Add to home screen feature achieves the same result as downloading from an app store, but without going through the app store process. After the PWA is installed on the home screen, no further updates are required. These apps automatically update in the background and assure customers always get to see the most recent content.
According to the Google report, Flipkart saw 60% of customers who had uninstalled their native app return to use the Flipkart PWA. Quick installs with PWA are proven to make a difference on user engagement and success.
5. Quick Loading & Instant Performance
Caching is one of the significant features of PWAs over native apps. This feature makes it speedy by storing the repetitive elements and later can inject them into the browser. This creates an eCommerce site more user-friendly and loads up pages quickly.
Internet users always demand excellent speed, especially with the rise of mobile-first and mobile online usage. According to research, 53% of visitors leave a website after 3 seconds of page loading.
Moreover, PWAs provide extremely smooth and fast user experiences. They can load within just 1 second, creating a true instant speed experience and engaging the user right from the start.
Furthermore, PWAs are using significantly less disk space on both the server and the users’ devices. Plus, it provides the benefits such as faster loading times, less data usage, and lesser storage space.
For example, BookMyShow’s PWA takes less than 3 seconds to load and witnessed increased conversion rates by over 80%. The PWA is 54 times smaller than an Android app and 180 times smaller than an iOS app.
6. Less Data Consumption
Even though on a slow internet connection, PWAs load faster. It leverages new and open web APIs to deliver a mobile web experience that uses less data but loads fast. Thus, it engages users in multiple ways.
Wrapping Up
Everyone’s lives are heavily dependent on mobile phones in almost every aspect. Everything has gradually changed, from how we spend our time surfing the Internet and devices to how we shop. Today, the top users’ demands are: engaging user experience, high loading speed, instant access to information, and network independence.
We can’t ignore that PWAs provide immersive user experience and successful outcomes. For example, the Goliaths like Alibaba, Flipkart, and Twitter use PWAs to dominate the marketplace.
Getting started with PWAs can always be an excellent choice for newly launched or old eCommerce stores.
Whether you are opting for a full-fledged PWA or choosing the “add to home screen” feature or more, adopting a PWA should be a top priority, regardless of the size of the business.
What’s more? With minimal investment, any business can experience a drastic change in its targeted audience and conversion rates. Finally, you can start sharing better results.
A team of skilled Progressive web app developers from a professional & trustworthy front-end development company can help your eCommerce business enhance user engagement and revenue by over 300% with progressive web app development services. Also, you can offer an immersive app experience while users visit your website.
If you want to share your thoughts, ideas or suggestions on this topic, please comment below.
