Progressive Web Apps — The Future Of Mobile Shopping

The Digital revolution has had a massive impact on the taste and preferences of the consumers. And such a radical change has changed consumers’ purchase habits that leans more towards mobile-based applications, content, and other necessities.

We all are struggling during this pandemic, many businesses have incurred significant loss, but do you know the pandemic was nothing less than Christmas for Amazon?

Let’s see how!

Amazon’s Christmas Came Early!

Amazon’s sales in May and July were up by up to 60% compared to previous year sales of the same period.

You might think that we are going off-topic, but giants like Amazon have the ability and resources to affect users’ purchasing decisions. Tiny ads between your youtube videos, ad posts while scrolling through Facebook and Instagram feed, all of these can affect your subconscious more or less and ultimately plays a vital role in your daily decision making, for shopping as well.

The Amazon story was not related to what we are going to talk about, but it is essential to understand that people have started using mobile devices like never before. The pandemic has helped this change even more. The world has over 3 billion smartphone users right now, which is almost 50% of the world’s population, and on average, a person spends around 3 hours daily on their mobile device. Millennials are way ahead of these statistics by spending 5 hours daily on their mobiles.

The use of mobile devices is not limited to calling; it is a medium of the current purchasing cycle. If you don’t want to go out of the market, you’ll have to change your business accordingly.

The trend has already begun for mobile-first web apps. Mobile-first means that you’ll have to develop your web app to be comfortable and fast when accessed on a mobile device.

So, What Is PWA?

Let’s talk about how PWA comes into this picture by taking the example of Poland’s Kubota shoe company, which has been there in the Polish market since 1994. It had seen a drastic lower sales and revenue trend when companies like Adidas and Nike came into the Polish market. They had physical as well as online stores that took Kubota by surprise. But they did a glorious return in the market when they launched their PWA store.

Kubota launched their e-commerce PWA which resulted in a 192% growth of daily visitors and 26% growth of average monthly visits. [Source — PWA Stats]

By this example, you can understand how PWAs can help a local player beat world league players.

PWA is nothing but a package of things that make a web app better in terms of rich user experience, by providing features Installable like a native mobile application, loading time less than 3 seconds, push notifications, and offline biometric support. The new PWAs are also incorporated with AR/VR technologies to enhance the purchasing experience.

For Example:

Oneplus has launched a home demo for a TV using AR; these new-age technologies can give extraordinary results when merged. Imagine if you are a furniture seller and can show the actual product at the customer’s place without even going there.

These features were only possible with native mobile applications before, but the tables have turned now. PWAs are built at a lesser cost than mobile applications and with the same features. Moreover, it is not a device or platform-specific, which means your PWA can work in Android, iOS, Windows devices, and work in desktop devices.

The e-commerce websites often struggle with higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates; many times, users abandon the checkout process when the process takes longer.

By overcoming this situation with the help of PWA, many companies have achieved outstanding results. Let’s check those out;

1. OLX saw a 250% hike in its engagement rate and a 146% hike in its click-through rate on ads with push notification. With PWA’s help, they witnessed 23% faster interaction that resulted in 80% fewer bounce rates. [Source — PWA Stats]
2. MakeMyTrip’s PWA witnessed a 160% increase in shopper sessions and a 3x conversion rate. First-time shoppers convert 3x more time on PWA as compared to a native app. [Source — PWA Stats]
3. BookMyShow saw a drastic increase in its revenue and an 80% increase in its conversion rate after shifting to PWA. According to the team, the PWA takes less than 3 seconds to load completely. [Source — PWA Stats]
4. UK clothing brand George witnessed a 31% increase in conversion, 2× lower bounce rate, and a 20% increase in page views after upgrading to a PWA. [Source — Google Developers — Case Studies]
5. AliExpress saw an improvement in their conversion rate for new users by 104% across all browsers, with 2× more pages visited and 74% more time spent per session. [Source — PWA Stats]
6. Flipkart’s users spent 3× as much time on-site with 40% higher re-engagement and 3× lower data usage via their Progressive Web App. [Source — PWA Stats]
7. Flipkart’s PWA is driving 50% of its new customer acquisition. Nearly 60% of visitors to the PWA had previously uninstalled the native app primarily to save space. [Source — PWA Stats]
8. The Starbucks PWA has increased daily active users 2×. Orders on the desktop are nearly the same rate as mobile. [Source — PWA Stats]

Why Should You Choose PWA?

• An important factor that can influence your decision to go with PWA rather than native mobile applications is, in iOS applications, if you are selling any digital goods, you’ll have to pay 30% from your sales revenue that occurred from the app to Apple. And this increases the cost of your product, and you might lose customers. So it is better to go with PWA where these charges are not applicable.
• Another thing is that PWAs are easily maintained, suppose if you want to make small changes in your UI if it is a native application, you’ll have to follow the deployment process altogether. Whereas PWAs are just like any other web apps that you can easily update.
• For maintaining native apps, you’ll have to purchase account subscriptions; for google play store, it is a one-time fee, but for the apple app store, you need to pay 99 USD every year to maintain your apps on the store. Apart from that, your app must be following the guidelines of respective stores; otherwise, you can remove it or block it anytime. On average more than 200 thousand apps are released on the app store every year, and when it comes to the play store, the number is over 1 million.

Now, If we assume 1% of them are shopping apps, then you can imagine the level of competition amidst the stores. The deciding factor would be the number of downloads of your app, which brings it to the top of the list. Otherwise, no one can ever find if this kind of app exists in the store. But PWAs are web apps, so SEO can help it make it to the top of the list, and then by making the app interactive, you can make a consistent user base, which will ultimately help your business.

Wrapping up

In the end, it is your choice how you want to project your shop in front of potential consumers; if you already have a consistent large customer base, you can opt for native apps keeping all the cost in mind. Suppose you are thinking about growing your business for mobile users without losing desktop customers. In that case, you should choose PWAs, which, in my opinion, is a cost-effective and new generation solution.

In case you need any help in PWA development and are looking for a tech-friendly solution, ZealousWeb is awaiting your call! Write to us about your PWA development needs and we’ll customize the perfect solution just for you.

Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.