What is PWA and what are the benefits for your e-commerce website?

The explosive growth of e-commerce has helped fuel innovation across the entire digital landscape and development of the progressive web app (PWA) has been one of the most exciting solutions in a world that is increasingly going mobile.

The latest evolution of front-end web technology, PWAs have been utilized for several years by large e-commerce brands from Alibaba to Zadig & Voltaire. In 2022, PWAs stand at the forefront of e-commerce brand initiatives, and are embraced by small and medium-sized stores looking to capitalize on the broad range of benefits they provide, both for themselves and their customers. 

First Things First – What is PWA?

PWA is a framework for building e-commerce websites that look, feel and perform like native apps on mobile platforms while also functioning like regular websites on standard browsers. 

Built with web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, a PWA allows users to work offline, receive push notifications and store information like login credentials, all without the inconvenience of having to visit an app store, conduct a search, download the app, update it, etc. And, for e-commerce brands, the PWA offers the proverbial “best of all worlds” – a website with the speed, flexibility and functionality of a native app but without the issues (build costs, deployment costs, marketing costs) that can so often impact the bottom line.

Benefits For Your E-commerce Brand

• Improved Customer Reach

Because, unlike native apps, a brand’s PWA is easily discoverable via a web search, customers have no need to look any further to find the store. And, the superb CX on mobile devices does not detract from how the PWA performs on a non-mobile browser – the transition is seamless.

• Increased Engagement

PWA features like push notifications provide an enormous range of advantages. Customers can now receive information from your ecommerce store straight to their phones – from new sales promotions to highly personalized offers to updates on orders, shipping, et al. 

• Better Conversion Rates

While PWA works equally well in mobile and desktop environments, it is particularly helpful in mobile commerce, where small screens and “fat fingers’’ can put a damper on conversions.

Today, mobile commerce is quickly becoming the consumer’s preferred channel and will account for nearly three-quarters worth of all ecommerce sales in 2021. The consumer is clearly sending retailers a message: make it easy for me to shop from my mobile device and you will earn my business.

• Faster Speeds

Considering that more than half of shoppers will abandon a mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, an e-commerce merchant’s speed is mission critical. Key PWA features like aggressive caching and “service workers” performing vital tasks in the background of the browser serve to enable quick and smooth user experiences.

• Greater Reliability

PWAs do not rely on an internet connection – they can work offline. Such independence provides stability and allows customers to remain on your site even in poor network conditions.

• Streamlined Marketing

In a native app scenario, app publishers invest in user acquisition (UA) campaigns that lead users to an app store where they’re encouraged to download the app — a less than ideal scenario. By contrast, users simply visit an e-commerce brand’s PWA site and they’re “in the app.”

• Truly Omnichannel Brand Experiences

A mantra for PWA is “build once/deploy everywhere.” This has never been more important in an era where customers expect a unified shopping experience between multiple channels. The flexibility of PWA ensures that your e-commerce brand will be able to provide that experience wherever and whenever the customer demands it.

• Higher Customer Lifetime Values

Increased costs for customer acquisition have made it even more critical for your current buyers to give you their repeat business, and the e-commerce stores that succeed will do so by increasing customer lifetime value. By enabling native app-like features and performance, the PWA can provide a winning customer experience, one that should bring them back to your site, again and again.

Summary

PWA provides a flexible, scalable and customizable solution for e-commerce brands that desire native app-level functionality for mobile devices while providing a seamless omnichannel customer experience. When one takes into account the cost of a “build once/deploy everywhere” PWA vs. the cost of developing, submitting for approval, marketing and deploying a native app, we are confident PWA offers a superior solution for e-commerce merchants, both today and into the future.

Want to learn more about PWA? Download our white paper “PWA+E-commerce = the winning formula”.