Is your company ready for a PWA e-commerce website?

Making the decision to build a new website is something no e-commerce brand takes lightly, and rightfully so. It is your front door, your flagship store and the window to your world.

And, while each company has its own unique set of wants and needs, any newly-built site must have significantly improved functionality and flexibility over the existing one. This is non-negotiable, and it is where a PWA (Progressive Web App) e-commerce website can become a game-changer. 

Why PWA is a game-changer?

Put in the simplest of terms, PWA is a framework for building e-commerce sites that look, feel and perform like native apps on mobile platforms while also functioning like regular websites on standard browsers. This “build once/deploy everywhere” model gives both brands and users the best of all worlds.

Already in use for several years by many large e-commerce brands, PWAs stand at the vanguard of front-end web development and are increasingly being implemented by small and medium-sized merchants eager to both grow and scale their businesses. 

Is your company ready for a PWA e-commerce website? To help answer that question, let’s take a look at some of the key areas where PWA can provide solutions.

Common E-commerce Website Problems Solved By PWA

• Site Performance

Considering that half of all shoppers will abandon a mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load and that every one-second delay can lower your conversion rate by as much as 20%, an e-commerce store’s speed and reliability have never been more important. 

PWA sites feature aggressive caching and employ “service workers” to perform vital tasks in the background of the browser, the combination of which delivers the convenience and speed of a dedicated app.

In terms of reliability, few things are worse for an online shop or more frustrating for an online shopper than a website that won’t load. To address this, PWAs do not require an internet connection – they can work offline. Such independence provides vastly increased stability and allows your site to function properly even under diminished network conditions.

• Customer Engagement

The PWA possesses many characteristics that lend themselves to fostering engagement with customers. For starters, even though it performs much like a native app, finding a brand’s PWA does not require a trip to the app store, a download, etc. – it is easily discoverable via a web search and viewable across all mobile and desktop browsers. 

And, as with a native app, PWA not only allows a user to store information like login credentials and favorite product pages, but also to add an icon for the site to their mobile home screens in order to enable one-touch access. 

Perhaps most importantly, PWA provides an e-commerce merchant the ability to send push notifications straight to a customer’s phone – the value and power of this engagement element cannot be overstated.

• Conversion Rates and Customer Lifetime Value

We already mentioned PWA performance and the impact on conversions, but it doesn’t stop at speed and reliability. The consumer has sent retailers a clear message over the past several years: make it easy for me to shop from my mobile device and you will earn my business.

As the retail e-commerce environment becomes increasingly mobile-centric, sites optimized for small screens are indispensable for turning shoppers into customers. Ease of use is critical, with the removal of as much friction as possible being paramount, and PWA helps to drastically reduce friction in all manner of ways.

Increased customer acquisition costs have made it ever more necessary to retain current customers, and the e-commerce stores that succeed will do so by increasing customer lifetime value. The PWA native app-like features and performance provide a superior, seamless experience for customers that should considerably aid in that endeavor.

• Personalized Customer Experience and Omnichannel Reach

Delivering a personalized customer experience has become a main goal for many e-commerce retailers, but achieving it is still a challenge. Many tools exist, however, and PWA, combined with headless commerce, lets you create highly personalized experiences quickly and more cost effectively. For instance, by connecting your frontend presentation layer directly to your CMS, you can easily customize what the end user sees, and engage in a deeper level of storytelling.

As mentioned earlier, PWA is “build once/deploy everywhere.” In practice, this means that a PWA site will work in every mobile and desktop environment, thus delivering the user an omnichannel experience. In addition, a shopper’s product, content and brand preferences, payment options and shipping information will all be available on every device.

Summary

PWA has rapidly become an effective solution for e-commerce brands who desire native app functionality at a much lower cost and with greater flexibility.

Do you think it could be a solution for your company? Read our article about the requirements for a successful PWA implementation.