Today’s users demand a more convenient and speedy online shopping experience with a web app that provides a native-app-like experience that loads faster, offers offline accessibility, and works seamlessly on any device, regardless of the platform, be it mobile, desktop, or tablet. Here progressive web apps (PWA) come into play enabling e-commerce businesses to leverage the capabilities of web applications and convert them into an app-like experience to deliver a seamless user experience. Along with enhancing the user experience, PWA for e-commerce helps businesses boost their online visibility, drive better customer engagement, and increase conversions by developing a progressive web app.
To get a comprehensive understanding of progressive web apps, their features, and the benefits they offer to e-commerce businesses, we’ve prepared this guide highlighting these points that help them get the most out of the progressive web apps for elevating their customer shopping experience. Let’s dive into exploring them.
A progressive web app (PWA) is a web application that leverages modern web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebAssembly giving the impression of a native mobile app to visitors directly through a web browser. E-commerce business developers combine the best features of native mobile apps with the convenience and accessibility of the web to build cutting-edge PWA optimized for seamless offline experiences and better user engagement, making them ideal for businesses that want to provide their customers with a fast, reliable, and engaging online experience. These applications are designed with a responsive approach, ensuring seamless adaptation to various devices and screen sizes. This flexibility contributes to a consistent and user-friendly interface, whether customers access the platform from a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here is a quick rundown of the appealing features of e-commerce PWA that businesses must have an idea about to gauge the importance and benefit of building a user-friendly PWA for providing users with an engaging online shopping experience.
Customers will likely abandon the website due to slow loading and unresponsive web pages. E-commerce PWA helps overcome this challenge by utilizing service workers that properly cache all relevant information on the website, resulting in faster loading times even when the users experience slow unreliable, or slow network connections. To retain customers and keep the visitor hooked to your website, it's essential to use an e-commerce PWA.
Customers can effortlessly access your e-commerce website on their preferred mobile, tablet, or desktop devices with e-commerce PWA. This app seamlessly adapts to diverse devices and screen sizes, ensuring optimal user experiences regardless of the device. This adaptability also fosters a consistent and user-friendly interface, accommodating various platforms seamlessly.
One of the key features of e-commerce PWAs is that customers can install them directly from the web, without the need to go through an app store. When customers visit a website that is a PWA, they may receive a prompt or find an option to "Add to Home Screen" or "Install" the app. This action installs the PWA on your user device, creating an icon on their mobile home screen or app drawer.
E-commerce PWAs excel in offline functionality, enabling your users to browse products, access information, and complete transactions without a continuous internet connection, making them connectivity independent. This feature is particularly beneficial for users in areas with unreliable network coverage or for users roaming in the area with network connectivity issues.
The feature that was once available on native apps only is now implemented in the e-commerce PWAs known as push notifications. It helps e-commerce businesses to effectively re-engage with their customers or visitors by sending timely updates, promotions, and personalized alerts through push notifications that foster customer engagement and increase the chances of users returning to the platform for new offerings and updates.
With straightforward installation directly from the web, users can access the app conveniently without navigating app stores. PWAs also update seamlessly in the background, eliminating the need for manual updates. This approach ensures users always have the latest version, promoting a current and reliable experience without the inconvenience of traditional app store processes.
Safe and secure always served via HTTPS feature in PWAs is crucial for maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive transactional data. By enforcing HTTPS, e-commerce PWAs encrypt the communication between users and the e-commerce platform, protecting the personal and financial information of users from potential cyber threats. This security measure instills trust in users, assuring them that their data is safeguarded, thereby fostering a secure and reliable environment for online shopping.
Whether you’re running an existing e-commerce online store or looking to build a new one, you should consider building an e-commerce PWA to offer an unbeatable shopping experience to your customers. Below we’ve listed down some of the reasons why your e-commerce business needs a progressive web app:
E-commerce PWA is the key to elevating web performance. It allows implementing app shell architecture to cache basic structure and design elements of your app that improve initial load time. It compresses and optimizes images and implements lazy loading for images and other non-essential resources. This way, only the necessary content is loaded initially, and additional content is fetched as needed while the user interacts with the app. Additionally, e-commerce PWA uses background sync to synchronize data in the background, allowing users to interact with your app even when they have a spotty or no internet connection.
With push notifications, users can directly interact with your service through the PWA, receiving prompt alerts, notifications, deal offers, etc. on their smartphones without having to visit their emails or provide other necessary contact details upfront. The push notifications have an average click rate of 28% as compared to a 1-2% email click rate. Moreover, 25% of respondents share that they leave their online carts to abandon as the site they visited wants them to create an account, increasing the bounce rate and negatively impacting the conversion rate. With e-commerce PWA, businesses can enhance overall their web performance and decrease bounce rate.
Web page loading time is a crucial factor that significantly impacts user experience and satisfaction. According to Forbes, 40% of users leave the web page if it takes more than two seconds to load and 40% can't wait much longer if the loading time extends more than two seconds. An e-commerce PWA does a great job by allowing for faster loading even on slower connections.
These apps leverage advanced caching strategies to enhance page load times and load within typically a second. Furthermore, they occupy significantly less disk space, resulting in quicker loading times, reduced data consumption, and lower storage requirements. This results in a significantly improved user experience, with faster page loads, quicker access to product information, and an overall seamless browsing and shopping experience.
Many e-commerce businesses experience a decline in their conversion rates simply because of poor user experience, slow loading time, complicated checkout process, etc. With an e-commerce PWA, you can elevate your conversion rates through various enhancements, including swift loading times, offline capabilities, Seamless navigation, and a quick checkout process. Due to efficient caching and offline capabilities of e-commerce PWA, users receive a smooth checkout process with faster loading times. The seamless user experience, combined with native-like performance, makes PWA checkouts more user-friendly.
Additionally, PWAs eliminate the need for app store installations, streamlining the process for users. Flipkart's PWA outperforms its native app, with approximately 60% of customers choosing to reinstall the PWA after uninstalling the native app. Additionally, Alibaba, one of the leading e-commerce companies saw an increase in their conversion rates on the mobile web by 76% with the implementation of an e-commerce PWA. As a result, with a PWA consumers are more inclined to return and buy on your site, resulting in more significant revenue.
E-commerce PWA contributes to an interactive user experience through intuitive and easy-to-use design elements. The user interface is optimized for accessibility, which enables users to browse and explore online products efficiently. PWAs prioritize responsive design, adapting to various devices for consistent visual appeal. Elements such as navigation menus and interactive features are thoughtfully crafted to enhance user engagement.
The design focuses on quick and effortless access to information that allows users to find what they're looking for even offline efficiently. This emphasis on interactive and modern user interface elements enhances the overall usability of PWAs which makes them more appealing to users in comparison to traditional websites. By offering a combination of speed, accessibility, and user-centric UI features, e-commerce PWAs lead to interactive user experience and engagement.
Responsive website development is resource-intensive and costly as it requires ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and improvements while the cost doubles with the additional development of native apps. An e-commerce PWA eliminates the need for ongoing maintenance as the app updates seamlessly in the background. Additionally, PWAs operate on various devices without requiring the need to develop separate apps for different platforms. The single codebase ensures easier maintenance and updates, reducing ongoing expenses.
Furthermore, PWAs can be developed without the necessity for app store approvals, saving time and resources. Their adaptability to different screen sizes reduces the need for extensive device-specific customization. With these efficiencies, e-commerce businesses can streamline development processes, allocate resources more effectively, and achieve cost savings while delivering a consistent and engaging user experience across diverse devices.
E-commerce PWAs enhance SEO through several mechanisms. Their faster loading speeds, facilitated by service workers and efficient caching, contribute to improved page performance, a factor favored by search engines. Building a PWA for e-commerce increases the chances of your search rankings and helps you stand out among your competitors who are still utilizing the incompatible app version.
Whenever a user performs a search query related to your product service or offering, the chances of your site coming to the top of Google search results increase with the PWA, boosting the visibility of your e-commerce site and making it SEO-friendly.
PWAs further endorse HTTPS, enhancing the security of the browsing environment, a criterion acknowledged by search algorithms. Overall, these attributes of PWA enhance crucial SEO metrics, positively influencing the online visibility and ranking of e-commerce stores.
PWAs for e-commerce are extremely beneficial and of significant benefits as they deliver amazing features, including offline accessibility, quicker loading time, increased conversion rate, higher user engagement, seamless device compatibility, and much more. These apps help e-commerce businesses serve their customers better by bridging the gap and providing a seamless, app-like experience on the web. They combine the reach and accessibility of a website with the performance and engagement features of native applications. PWAs eliminate the need for installation from an app store, making them a convenient and inclusive solution for users across various devices. Many renowned e-commerce companies, such as Alibaba, AliExpress, Jumia, Flipkart, etc. are leveraging PWA to elevate their user experience and boost their conversion rates. With the e-commerce PWA, users enjoy exploring and shopping from your e-commerce store with increased accessibility and enhanced loading speed.
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