As the world is turning towards mobile, more & more business owners are leaving no stone unturned to provide their customers a smooth shopping & services experience. Along with the existing native iOS & Android applications, Progressive Web Applications also have occupied a significant margin in this industry.
Native iOS & Android applications have long supported mobile interactions, PWAs are poised to thoroughly evolve how customers utilize their mobile devices. With a highly powerful, app-like browsing experience, this evolving technology is set to blow away the experimental demands of today’s tech-savvy customer.
Stats about PWA
The Starbucks PWA has increased daily active users 2×. Orders on desktop are nearly the same rate as mobile.
UK clothing brand George saw a 31% increase in conversion, 2× lower bounce rate, and 20% increase in page views after upgrading to a PWA. The PWA was 3.8× faster than the previous site.
What is PWA?
A progressive web application is a JavaScript application that runs on the mobile web browser. In easy words, PWAs are web apps or a webpage that provides the look of a general mobile application while running on a web browser. The advanced JS features employed in creating these PWAs provide ultra-fast web pages along with improved user experience, better engagement of visitors, and high conversion rates. PWAs bridge the gap between web pages and native mobile applications. You can save the progressive web applications on your desktops like native Android or iOS app. PWA interfaces with the backend through an API. The backend is built of a database, FTP, Admin Panel, Cpanel, and catalogue, while the de-coupled frontend comprises of everything the customer sees and interacts with.
The frontend PWA fetches data such as product details from the server and sends data such as cart items to the server through APIs.
JS has been a part of ecommerce development for many years, but in the last decade, browsers and JS engines have reached a new level of enhancement, which allows applications to provide a better UI experience than traditional web pages.
The common technologies employed in developing Progressive Web Applications are:
Service Workers
These are the JavaScript programs that run independently of web pages and can intercept network requests. These are just like web workers but can be accessed by main threads that are running in different browser tabs at the same time.
Cache API
As the name suggests, it caches the types of request/response objects that PWAs assist upon. It is a system for storing and retrieving network requests and their responses. It was created to enable Service Workers to cache network requests so to provide appropriate responses even while offline.
Web-push notifications
Web-push notifications are notifications or messages that come from a web application. The customer gets them on its browser, desktop, or mobile device when the web application is not running in the browser.
Web App Manifest
Web App Manifest is a JSON file that tells the mobile browser about the PWA and how it should respond when installed on the user’s desktop or mobile device.
Why develop PWA for your Magento eCommerce Store?
Magento is one of the most preferred platforms for developing e-commerce applications. In 2018, this platform added another feather in its hat by introducing the PWA studio.
Magento PWA Studio is specifically focused on designing progressive web applications for websites built in Magento. Both Magento and PWA bring a plethora of benefits to your e-commerce application. Using the PWA studio, you can easily convert your e-commerce site to a PWA app.
Here are some of the thriving benefits of developing PWAs of your Magento application:
Avail M-commerce
Now people prefer to use mobile devices for regular shopping. In fact, according to reports, 28% of e-commerce is done using mobile in 2019, and 1.6 billion people use their mobile devices to shop globally. This preference for shopping through mobile has given rise to M-commerce or mobile commerce. However, not every business can afford to develop mobile applications after developing the e-commerce store. This is where PWA applications are helpful. PWA applications offer a cost-reliable solution to get a mobile app for your e-commerce site and save a great amount on app development, maintenance, and other costs.
No issues of Device Restriction and Fast Installation
All the PWAs are written in HTML, CSS, and JS i.e., it has a web connection. Hence, the users can access the PWA on their web browsers. All the major web browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari support PWAs.
In addition to this, a PWA also saves your time in installing the app. Unlike native iOS or Android apps, you can place the PWA on your screen in just a few taps. Also, PWAs consume much less space, vis-à-vis native or cross-platform apps. In short, PWAs get rid of device restriction as your customers can browse through your store with ease. PWA empowers you to load and share your Magento e-commerce on any device across every major OS.
Also Read: Magento 2 PWA -Progressive Web Apps Installation Guide
Better Performance
Google has stated, “53% of users will abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. And after being load, users expect the site to be fast, no janky scrolling, or slow responses”. Since PWAs make use of service workers, which are JS files that runs separately from the main browser thread and actively control the caching of assets, they deliver much better speed & performance than traditional native apps.
Higher conversion rates
A general user flow of shopping through an android app is:-
Open Google PlayStore-> Search App-> Click Install-> Accept Permissions-> Download and wait-> Use
Opposing the conventional user flow, PWA conversion flow is a lot shorter:- Open browser-> Lands on URL -> Either start shopping there or Add to the home screen on a native popup. Always remember that downloading the PWA is not necessary. PWA provides all the features inside the mobile web browsers, without the user adding it to their home screen.
Provide Offline Mode
The browser can cache the PWA and can be used when offline. It is great for businesses with product catalogues as it allows the shopper to go through the products even when not having an internet connection. It increases the engagement of users and boosts up the sales.
Highly SEO-Friendly
It is highly important for your e-commerce site to secure its place on the top three Google results. You can easily achieve this by converting your Magento application into a PWA. It will act as an indexable web page and provide your customers with an app-like experience.
In easy words, the PWAs serves multiple purposes of a website as well as the app. It will load in quite less time and get your website a better ranking, and of course, a higher ranking can enhance the visibility of your business.
Revenue friendly
Last but not least, PWAs save a lot of money, which you have to spent in native or cross-platform applications. The one time fees on the Google Play store to upload app is $25. The transaction fee, either for selling the app or doing payment within the app through the Google Play Platform, has a transaction fee of 30%.
While in Apple’s app store, you have to pay $99 per year for their right to publish and maintaining applications. Apple also takes a 30% commission in selling the app and in-app purchases. PWAs save this cost.
Brands that benefitted from PWAs
A successful company takes leverage of every upcoming technology. Whether big or small, all companies have started to develop PWAs for their websites so as not to lose any chunk of customers and gain more. Some of the most digitally advanced companies are already taking advantage of PWAs to the fullest. Here is the roster of them:
Twitter is using the PWA technology for its Twitter Lite Platform. In April 2017, it became the default mobile web experience for anyone logging onto Twitter, i.e. equivalent to 100 million per day. It increases user engagement and lowers data consumption.
- 65% increase in pages per session
- 75% increase in Tweets sent
- 20% decrease in bounce rate
Uber
Uber’s PWA allows you to book a cab without downloading and installing the Uber app. Uber employs PWA technology as it can load in less than 2 seconds, which will do wonder for the Google rankings.
Flipkart
In 2015, Flipkart adopted the mobile-only strategy. The company observed adverse results after shutting down its mobile site and focusing on only their mobile app. After adopting the PWA, Flipkart has tripled time-on-site. Now the users spend an average of 3.5 minutes on Flipkart Lite versus 70 seconds on the previous version. Also, there is a 40% higher re-engagement rate and a 70% higher conversion rate.
Alibaba
One of the e-commerce giants, Alibaba, is seeing increased engagement across browsers after adopting PWA for its site. It brought an increase of 76% in total conversions. The “Add To Homescreen” prompt leads to users re-engaging four times more often than other mobile users.
Forbes
One of the most authentic global media companies, Forbes, has also employed PWA for its lightning-fast & quick loading features. Their traditional mobile browser experience took anywhere between 3 and 12 seconds to load on average. Now, with PWA tech installed, it’s 0.8 seconds.
The Washington Post
Yes, you heard it right. One of the leading newspapers of America has also opted for PWA. Nearly 55% of its traffic comes from mobile devices. PWA allows publishing more than 1,000 articles a day, with an average load time of 400 milliseconds. There is also an increase of 63% in mobile search users who returned within 7 days.
So, to conclude, we can say that Progressive Web Application for Magento eCommerce store can drastically improve your user engagement and sales revenue. So, hiring an ecommerce development company offering PWA development services is an excellent idea for your business.
Also Read How Much Does It Cost to Create an Ecommerce Website?
#23 Chase Tower, opp. Metro Pillar 31,
USA
UK
UK
