How Are Progressive Web Apps Useful To E-Commerce Platforms?

Marketing efforts alone cannot ensure that your business can reach the target audience. E-commerce businesses capture their audience preferences by analyzing their buying behaviour and purchase history.  The presence of the same mobile app on various platforms (iOS and Android) helps boost the market presence of e-commerce companies. Mobile e-commerce is way ahead than web e-commerce owing to the highly functional and engaging mobile apps or progressive web apps (PWA). As with any design/development project, it is important to customize user’s preferences and trace all the competitive websites that execute responsive web design in creative ways. Think about:

• Do the websites or apps that you frequently use on your mobile phone or other portable devices are responsive?
• Do you prefer one site over others that might provide similar services?
• Do you prefer mobile over desktop experience?

The possible answers to these questions can help you find out the challenges that you may have never noticed during your everyday browsing.

Can PWA eclipse the Native Application Development Completely?

It was almost impossible for any next-door technology to provide the same experience as the native applications, up until a few years back. Progressive web apps have deputized native mobile apps – all while making use of web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, CSS. Developers can use static site generators like VuePress or Gatsby to launch highly engaging PWA storefronts. PWA’s runs in a web browser – and they do not look different from other websites, but the performance and responsive nature make them an avid choice. The access to the app through the mobile home screen, the ability to access the app offline, and the push notifications

Why Google Supports Progressive Web Apps?

Google has emphasized the benefits and utility of the progressive web apps. Nearly 50% of the traffic comes from the smart-phone as an increasing number of people seek convenience with similar output. 5 years back in 2015, people were used to working on the shrunken version of the desktop site on your phone. It was more of pinching and zooming to view anything but it wasn’t an optimal experience.

Google also rolled some changes to search engine algorithms that time which now factor in a website’s mobile presence as a ranking signal. Search results certainly would be reflective of either all the factors working in favour or stumping the growth.

How Progressive Web Apps Can Help Uplift E-commerce Business?

• Progressive Web Apps help reach a wider audience, reduces the development costs and time, provide a good measure of speed and accessibility and help in better conversions.

• Progressive web applications empower headless commerce configurations – this involves decoupling the frontend presentation layer from the backend e-commerce functionality.

• Making use of progressive web applications gives the credibility of being responsive, connects the API to the commerce features that can drive customers through conversion.

• These are connected with the e-commerce applications from the backend.

• Progressive Web Apps run in a browser but give users the experience of a native app through key features like accessing the app through the mobile home screen, offline app access, push notifications etc.

Some Options to Build Ecommerce Store Using PWA

After understanding the utility of Progressive Web Apps, here are some platforms that go well with PWA’s:

• Gatsby is another powerful framework that can be used for building static PWA sites with React. It helps in faster app development. PWA e-commerce storefront can easily be created using Gatsby on the frontend and BigCommerce on the backend.

• Deity is a micro-services and PWA oriented platform that takes a modular approach to solve enterprise PWA requirements and can be leveraged with various front-ends. They enable businesses of all sizes to offer scalable, robust web and mobile experiences to their users by boosting the front-end and easily getting connected with BigCommerce’s SaaS headless platform on the backend. Faster innovation and lower cost of ownership in PWA’s coupled with headless configuration account for creating better web experiences for the customers.

• Vue Storefront in combination with Gridsome and Next.js is the fast-growing framework used to create PWA. It is completely up to the businesses to decide the approach that they have to follow with the context of the kind of experience they’re trying to create. Frameworks like Vue and React in combination with Next.js and Gatsby are increasingly being used for an inclusive, global and adaptive approach to web application development.

• Angular is another framework in the row that doesn’t necessarily have the tools to ease you out in PWA development but you can still refer to the documentation or tutorials to get started.

Conclusive: Why is PWA’s so Important to Build an E-Commerce Platform?

Progressive Web Apps come with some technical advantages that translate into direct business benefits – with a lot of offline capabilities (that hybrid apps or native apps) do not have, having the pre-caching with service workers capability makes for a fast, smooth shopping experience.  PWA audits in Chrome DevTools (Google Lighthouse) allow you to spot & fix performance issues quickly. These also help boost user engagement metrics that can be a prominent SEO ranking signal. It subsequently reduces the development budget as this single application has the features of the web as well as mobile apps. If you’re looking at how to create progressive web apps for your business, contact our experts and discuss your needs.