Progressive Web Apps are not new.
In fact, the term “Progressive Web Apps” was first coined back in 2015 by two Google employees named Alex Russel and Frances Berriman in an article titled “Progressive Web Apps: Escaping Tabs Without Losing Our Soul”.
And since then, the biggest tech companies like Google and Microsoft have been vigorously promoting the PWA concept as a way to bridge the gap between web and native mobile applications.
Today, PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) have successfully dominated the mobile app industry, thanks to its irresistible features.
Recommended Read: PWA – The Revolution of Mobile Web
What is a Progressive Web Application (PWA)?
In layman terms, a PWA is basically a website that has been made to look and feel like a native mobile app but is delivered through the web.
It is a web application that is developed by combining the best of native mobile applications and mobile web pages.
As a result, PWAs can load and run progressively in mobile browsers while delivering app-like user experience.
Magento has recently adopted the PWA technology trend and is now quickly becoming the Progressive Web Application platform for the eCommerce industry.
Magento and PWA
For many years, Magento has always been the preferred eCommerce platform for entrepreneurs & online retailers.
And now, Magento has finally added the Magento PWA Studio to its suite.
In 2017, Magento collaborated with Google to bring the PWA features to the Magento platform by the end of 2018.
And with Magento 2.3 release, they’ve finally added the Magento PWA studio along with lots of impressive updates.
You can check the Magento Commerce 2.3 release notes and Magento Open Source 2.3 release notes from its official page to know more.
In fact, Magento is one of the first eCommerce platforms that now enables its users to fully utilize the potential of PWAs.
The all-new Magento PWA Studio has all the required tools to successfully develop, manage, and maintain a PWA store on top of the Magento platform.
Why Does Magento PWA Matter for the eCommerce Industry?
Magento PWA is believed to be the next big thing in the eCommerce industry for many reasons.
For starters, rather than developing independent websites and separate mobile applications for iOS and Android, PWA makes an easy route to the site on the customers’ gadgets.
Plus, building a native application involves a lot of duplication of development efforts for different platforms – iOS, Android, etc.
And, even when an application is finally developed, it’s super difficult for eCommerce businesses to attract and retain customers and requires investing tens of thousands of dollars for continuously promoting the application.
In the next section, we’ve explained all the plus points Magento PWA and how it’s better than building a native app for an eCommerce business.
Why is Magento PWA a Better Choice than Native Apps for eCommerce Businesses?
Magento PWA offers a ton of benefits that can completely elevate an eCommerce business to the next level.
Following are some of the key points that make the Magento PWA a far better choice over the native apps for eCommerce businesses.
- Worldwide Compatibility
There are more than 3.7 billion potential customers who go to the internet using their smartphones.
Now, even if less than half of them open your PWA, your eCommerce business is still at the advantage when you compare the 700 million Android and iOS potential customers.
The point is, your eCommerce business will be in a lot higher benefit in terms of reaching customers worldwide when you develop a PWA instead of native mobile apps.
- Zero App Stores Dependency
Unlike native mobile apps, which need to be uploaded to either the Play Store or App Store in order to make them accessible to customers, PWAs are directly accessible through a URL connection and an internet browser.
This basically saves you a lot of costs and shortens the time-to-market tremendously, by eliminating the entire dependency on the App Stores.
- Lesser Development Cost
Since PWAs depend on the web and don’t need to comply with the Apple App Store and Google Play Store guidelines, the development cost of PWA is a lot lower than native applications.
In fact, this is perhaps one of the key reasons why PWA is considered to be the best choice for startups and SMBs.
The cost of Magento PWA development, for example, will come somewhere between $3,000 to $10,000 USD, while the Native application development cost starts from $15,000 USD.
- Accessibility
To use a PWA app, all that a customer needs to do is click on a connection and it will dispatch the application.
To use a native app, on the other hand, customers need to go through a multi-step process like finding the app store, downloading the application, giving it different consents, and so on.
So, when compared to native apps, PWAs are a lot simpler and easier in terms of accessibility.
How Magento PWA can Improve Your eCommerce Business?
Magento PWA offers a ton of benefits and by developing a PWA for your online store, you can drastically improve your eCommerce business.
Let’s take a look at the various benefits that the Magento PWA has to offer.
1 – Sales
According to Statista, 67.2% of total eCommerce sales in 2019 were done through smartphones and tablet devices.
And by the end of 2020, it is forecasted to reach 70.4% worldwide.
This data clearly proves that m-commerce is driving more sales, which is, in fact, the main reason Magento decided to bring the PWA to its platform.
2 – Speed
The most vital factor for all kinds of websites (including online stores) is its loading speed.
According to research conducted by Google, as many as 53% of customers will immediately leave if the mobile version of a website or online store takes more than 3 seconds to load.
PWAs can greatly impact the loading speed of your online store as they’re blazingly fast.
PWA achieves this speed due to its browser-level caching which is only possible because of service workers.
In simple words, PWAs basically use service workers to precache the part of a PWA to load it instantly whenever a user opens it next time.
3 – SEO
Apart from loading speed, another outstanding advantage of PWA is its “mobile-first index”, which helps to boost the SEO.
As you might already know that Google has recently started indexing the mobile version of websites first, meaning that websites that are not mobile-friendly will not be ranked in the top positions on Google SERPs.
But, since PWAs come with a mobile-first index feature and the fact that PWAs are highly engaging, reliable and comes with offline support, PWAs can contribute a lot in the overall user engagement of your online store.
Recommended: Magento 2 SEO PRO Extension
4 – Responsive Design
Apart from mobile-first indexing, Google has also said that the website with responsive design will also be ranked higher in Google SERPs.
And as you might have guessed, PWAs have the ability to provide a consistent experience across all devices, be it a smartphone, desktop, or tablet, resulting in improved customer experience.
Hence, building a Magento PWA store will help you attain higher rankings in the Google search results.
5 – Cross-Platform Compatibility
PWAs can run smoothly on every mobile web browser as well as platforms. This includes Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and so on.
This is possible because of PWA’s single code base, which makes it possible to run it on multiple browsers, platforms, including the desktops.
Besides this, PWAs don’t depend on App Stores for distribution, which means that the updates can be directly delivered to users in real-time just like a normal website.
And because of this, eCommerce businesses don’t have to build and maintain separate apps for different platforms.
6 – Offline Support
A Magento PWA store can be partly as well as completely made to work offline.
For example, customers can browse the products on your store and add items to the cart without an internet connection if they’ve visited the pages at least one time before.
And not only that, but customers can also place their orders without internet connectivity, and once the internet is connected, the orders will automatically get processed.
7 – Add to Home Screen
PWA online stores can be directly added to the Home Screen of smartphones just like a native app icon.
When a user visits your PWA-powered online store, an “Add to Home Screen” pop-up will appear. Once the users click on it, the PWA version of your online store will be added to their smartphone’s home screen.
Later, when the users click on the icon of your PWA store, they will be instantly redirected to your online store, eliminating the need to open the web browser and entering the URL of your online store every time they want to visit.
This can directly impact on the time spent by the user on the app, which can most certainly result in higher conversion rates.
8 – Push Notifications
Push Notifications are basically messages that are sent as notifications by the application.
In fact, push notifications have proven to increase user engagement by up to 88%, making it a critical feature for eCommerce businesses.
And PWAs come with in-built push notifications features that can help to keep your customers informed about the latest products, deals, order updates, and more.
You can witness the power of PWA push notifications along with other features by yourself in this live Magento PWA Studio developed by us.
Magento PWA Success Stories
Although we’ve covered almost everything you need to know about Magento PWA and how it can improve your eCommerce business.
But it’s time that we shift from theory to practice.
You see, whenever a new technology emerges, it doesn’t always live up to its promise.
There have been many cases where the technology seemed perfect in theory but turned out to be a failure in the real market.
However, Magento PWA is an exception.
It has already delivered amazing results to many eCommerce businesses that have implemented it.
Below, we have shared 3 such real-life examples where Magento PWA performed exceptionally well for eCommerce businesses in the real market.
Success Story #1 – Lancôme
Lancôme is a French luxury cosmetics brand that distributes its products internationally.
In 2017, Lancôme witnessed a huge increase in mobile users to their online store and so they decided to revamp its store into a PWA-powered store in order to increase their mobile conversions. And as you can guess, their attempt was a massive success and Lancôme mobile conversions grew by 17% in a very short period of time.
In fact, since their new PWA-powered store had in-built push notifications feature, they also managed to reverse cart abandonment. To be precise, the conversion of their past abandoned carts increased by a whopping 12%.
Most importantly, mobile visitors on the Lancôme store now spend 56% more time browsing products and their bounce rate has also decreased by 10%.
Success Story #2 – Alibaba Group
Alibaba is the world’s largest B2B online trading platform that upgraded its online web store to a PWA-powered store in 2016.
Once revamped, their new PWA-powered store witnessed a 76% increase in their overall conversions in less than six months!
Plus, they also started to receive 22% more mobile users. And more importantly, the possibility of accessing their new PWA store from the smartphone’s home screen delivered 4x growth in user interaction.
And that’s not all! – AliExpress, which is a part of the Alibaba Group, also received the PWA upgrade in the same year and witnessed a massive 104% increase in conversion rate across all desktop browsers. Not only that, but the PWA also increased the users’ session time by 74% for AliExpress.
Success Story #3 – George
Acquired by Walmart in the early 2000s, George is a popular clothing brand in the UK that recently revamped its online store into a PWA-powered store mainly with the intent to improve the store’s loading speed.
But, as a result of this upgrade, not only their loading speed decreased by 25% and bounce rate by 50%, but the company also witnessed significant improvement in conversion rate by 31% and user engagement by 20%.
The key takeaway from all these success stories is that upgrading your existing Magento store to a Magento PWA-powered store can definitely help to:
- Increase users’ session time
- Boost mobile conversion rate
- Improve user engagement
- And resolve cart abandonment problem
Be One of the Early Adopters of Magento PWA to Transform your eCommerce Business
Progressive Web App is not just a momentary trend but a permanent shift in the web-app browsing experience.
So, it’s wise to join the Magento PWA bandwagon as early as possible to enjoy all its benefits before your competitors do.
At MageDelight, we are believe that every eCommerce business deserves a personalized approach to PWA implementation, which is why we’ve introduced a highly personalized Magento PWA Studio Setup and service to help individuals eCommerce businesses build tailored-made PWA storefronts that help to unlock their full potential.
