How PWAs speed up sites, improve user experience, and help online stores boost conversions without extra cost.
11/10/2019 Reading time: 7 min. Read the article on vc.ru→. Five years ago, mobile apps were expected to drive online commerce. But they were quickly replaced by something more convenient, simpler, and easier to use and manage. Here is why 2019 can be called the year of PWA and why marketers love this technology.
It is already clear that the online segment is becoming the main driver of commerce: by business logic, marketplaces follow the buyer. But even here, things are not entirely smooth.
To capture all conversion channels, an online store has to invest at least three times: in a website, an iOS app, and an Android app. And the result?
Just 5-7 years ago, experts predicted that the future belonged to mobile apps and that browsers would capture only a tiny share of conversions.
But 2018-2019 statistics show how wrong they were.
The average user downloads ZERO apps per month.
The average user spends the lion's share of their time, about 85%, in just FIVE favorite apps.
What is a PWA? In short, it is a mobile app in the browser. It does not require mandatory installation and inherits all the best qualities of native apps: an attractive and fast interface, flexibility in development, and independence from the back end. It also adds its own advantages: it is easy to find through Google and is several times smaller, sometimes tens of times smaller, than a regular app.
In addition to its regular mobile app, Starbucks built a PWA for order collection. It offered the familiar, user-friendly Starbucks app interface, but the PWA was 99.84% lighter.
The result was immediate: orders through mobile
Online orders have doubled and are now nearly on par with desktop orders.
What once seemed fundamentally impossible:
Where web once simply could not match native apps technically, the two are now almost on par.
The human factor also matters: more than half of users do not download anything from app stores at all. That is official statistics.
The same users willingly visit hundreds of sites per month; this is normal online behavior for them. As a result, customer acquisition through PWA sites can be up to 10 times cheaper than through a mobile app: it is more convenient for users both to search for information and to install apps without going through an app store. E-commerce players were among the first to adopt PWA and have already appreciated the technology's capabilities.
A PWA can be installed on a desktop, smartphone, tablet, or in-store terminal. Its operation does not depend on the device OS, so separate apps for Windows, iOS, and Android are not needed.
Found through Google and any other search engine.
For example, the core of Uber's PWA is 50 kilobytes. It loads in milliseconds even on 2G.
No lag or stuttering: PWA responds to every user action instantly.
Connection drops and slow internet will not affect the user experience. Unlike a website, a PWA will keep working reliably. More than that, the app itself will open even with no internet connection, although it still needs product and pricing data that must be fetched online.
That means less time and fewer resources are spent developing and redesigning the PWA interface and customer interaction logic.
User experience is not affected by what happens behind the scenes while customers choose and place an order. They can trust that the order will reach the system and be fulfilled on time, even during peak load periods such as Black Friday or holiday shopping. PWAs can store data if the back end is unavailable or overloaded, then send it once the connection is restored or the load decreases.
Can be added to the home screen.
Can be published in the App Store and Google Play.
PWA has hit the sweet spot between user and marketer expectations.
The user sees a beautiful interface that is convenient and pleasant to use.
Pages load quickly, products are easy to find, and adding to favorites or placing orders is simple.
The path from decision to purchase is reduced to three steps:
As a result, users spend more time on the site, convert to buyers more often, and place more orders.
After implementation, average session duration increased by 74%, and the average user began viewing twice as many pages. Conversion of new users into buyers increased by 104%! The La Nature online store PWA, developed by kt.team, delivered a 65% increase in mobile conversion in its first months, users viewed 30% more products, and page load time dropped to 0.1 seconds.
The marketer sees not only these results but also the internal processes involved in implementing PWA. They are used to hearing, "OK, we'll move that button, but that will take a week of development."
The CMS dictates a certain logic that the online store design has to follow.
Building a PWA frees marketers from rigid constraints and lets them test new tools and logic without spending a fortune.
The marketer is used to fighting for a place on the customer's home screen, and with PWA, unlike a website, that spot is easy to win.
Let’s be honest: a marketer does not want to pay three times for the same product. With PWA, development costs drop dramatically.
PWA technology has been known since 2015. But its real moment has come now. Only since mid-2018 have iOS versions below 11.3 and all recent Android versions supported PWAs. PWAs open in all modern browsers without distortion or issues. Since February 2019, PWAs can be added to the App Store and Google Play, giving users the option to download the app from a familiar source.
PWA Studio is Magento's built-in technology.
It is fully compatible with the other functions of this system.
But even Magento integrators do not always recommend using this technology to build a PWA. "There are two reasons why we do not advise our clients to develop PWA in PWA Studio.
At least as of today.
First, SSR (server-side rendering) is still not implemented in PWA Studio.
To search bots, Vue Storefront looks the same as a regular website, which is important for SEO...
Second, PWA Studio has a smaller stack abstraction layer.
It is tailored to Magento, while integration with other e-commerce platforms is not as smooth.
An independent Vue Storefront integrates smoothly with any back end and exchanges data with it." Andrey, CEO of kt.team
Do native apps still have any advantages over PWA in e-commerce?
Which technology will keep its lead in the future?
