How Progressive Web Apps Can Transform Your Ecommerce Business

The digital world is changing at a fast pace. People want something unique and new every other day, which is why a simple website or an app appears to be boring to them. Thankfully, PWA is here and is sweeping the eCommerce business off the feet.

What’s so impressive about PWA?

The simplest way to define PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) is that they are traditional websites that behave like mobile apps.

Built using web technologies and JavaScript, PWA is designed to provide the user experience of a native mobile application on a website. They need not be downloaded. The user can simply install, use it offline, and receive important notifications when online. They are fast, secure, browser-agnostic and reliable; and highly cost-effective because it can be developed in the fraction of the cost of developing a native mobile application. Progressive Web Apps are built with a very user-friendly mechanism and possess the capacity to load any cached content taking mobile optimization to the next level.

When to opt for developing PWA for e-commerce

Developing PWA needs to have some reasons and strategies behind it like, you are on a tight budget and can’t afford enough resources to build a native eCommerce mobile application; you want to deliver something interactive and amazing to the mobile users, you lack website traffic on to your site, you don’t have time to market your business etc.

How are they different from native apps?

• Generally, websites are built to inform users about your product and services while PWA is meant to solve and simplify any complexity the user is facing.
• They are fast loading and save the entire web page to the user’s local storage and updates the content at regular intervals.
• PWAs are much easier and quicker to develop and need no APIs with backward compatibility.
• Native apps usually attract smaller audiences and are expensive and labour and time consuming to create and run. Hence, transforming websites into PWAs seems to be a viable option rather than making them more adaptive or turning to native apps.

How can they revolutionize an eCommerce business?

PWA can boom businesses. Here’s how it can empower your eCommerce;

1.  Low-cost but better development – The development cost of PWA is about 10 times lower than building a native app from scratch. If you have HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you are all set for PWA, that’s all you need.

2. Lightning speed – Lack of speed can kill your business. The loading time of the website can be a big turn off to the users but with PWA you have nothing to worry about as it is 4 times faster compared to a responsive e-commerce portal. Progressive apps save the structure of a website’s layout and prevent it from reproducing them in a browser upon every user’s request which saves vital seconds and makes the site more impressive and user-friendly.

3. Offline mode – There’s nothing a customer rejoices than things working even in offline mode. Guess what, the progressive web application can work in some way when there is no internet connection using cached data and some special scripts. They are even automated to repeat the components of the layouts stored in the browser cache.

4. High security – Security is always a concern in any matter. As technology advances so do the cybersecurity threats arises. Fortunately, Progressive Web Apps comprises of HTTPS that ensures the protection of users’ payment transactions, secure user accounts; and the privacy of users’ identity and browsing. It’s cool and secure Payment Request API also allows the users to enjoy fast and secure payments in no time.

5. Presentation and performance – If you think customers only enjoy shopping and has nothing to do anything else, then you are wrong. They do notice how your site looks, how it makes you feel about and the site and what and how they display and spread what they felt; hence it is crucial to make them feel good. Caches, server text, images, and other content are what that slows the website down. Well, PWA features both quick operation and impeccable performance using which you will end up improving retention rates and customer loyalty.

Final thoughts

There is no doubt that PWAs are taking over the E-commerce world by storm. In the coming years, PWA will even transform the way eCommerce works, we never know. No matter what, PWA is something you must seriously think about if you really want to deliver an impeccable user-experience.