As a leader in cloud e-commerce innovation, Magento keeps finding new ways of helping merchants expand their business. The platform offers all the features needed to ensure an engaging shopping experience, which can really make your business skyrocket.

Better yet, the number of features is constantly expanding to meet the ever-changing consumer needs and stay up-to-date with the market trends.

Progressive Web Apps are certainly one of the most powerful features at merchants’ disposal. Using them can have a myriad of positive effects on your e-commerce business, if you take full advantage of them.

What are progressive web apps?

By 2022, mobile commerce in the US is expected to account for around half of all online retail sales. This imposes a need on the merchants to ensure the best mobile shopping.

Many of them take to the belief that optimizing their website for smartphones is enough. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. According to a research by The State of Retailing Online and partners, merchants can only expect an average conversion rate of 2.3% from mobile web.

But the conversion rate grows to 6% with native apps. This means that building an app for your e-commerce store is a far better solution than just ensuring that the site is mobile-friendly.

However, this solution suffers from a few drawbacks as well. The biggest of which is that not a lot of people are inclined to download a native app to make a purchase. A large number of your customers may be one-time purchasers, or at least they may think so at first, and downloading an app for that is just too bothersome.

So is there another solution?

Yes, and it’s in the form of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Essentially, these apps take the best of mobile web and native apps and create a blend of features that makes mobile shopping much more enjoyable. They combine the instant gratification and convenience of a mobile website with a rich set of features that native apps offer.

PWAs ensure a fast and frictionless mobile shopping experience, which is bound to yield a variety of amazing results.

Why should you use them?

By the end of 2018, merchants will get to explore the new Magento 2.3. Among a ton of features that can open many doors for business owners, PWA Studio is the most exciting. Here are some of the reasons why you’d want to take full advantage of it:

1. Engagement and conversion rate boost

Engagement is essential to success. If you can’t draw your audience in with your products and marketing efforts, it’s really just a matter of time before you have to close up shop. That said, incorporating PWAs is a foolproof way of increasing engagement.

Take a look at Trivago as an example. After the company implemented PWAs into its website, it saw an increase in engagement of 150%. Moreover, the hotel offers click-outs got a 97% boost.

Of course, conversion is still the thing that matters the most. Turning people into buyers is what keeps your business afloat at the end of the day.

Magento promises that its PWA solution will be able to increase conversion by more than 50%. There’s definitely proof to support this claim, as the Grand Velas Riviera Maya increased its Black Friday conversions by 53% once the resort started using PWAs.

The ability to raise your engagement and conversion rates can take your business to another level. There’s a lot of evidence that PWAs can make this happen, so this alone is reason enough to give them a shot. Still, the benefits that you can gain extend far beyond just this.

2. Lightning-fast browsing

According to Google’s data, 53% of people will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. That’s more than half of the potential consumers for a slow-loading site.

PWAs ensure instant loading and incredible browsing speed. The result is a highly responsive user interface that can greatly enhance the users’ shopping experience. Moreover, it makes sure that pages won’t have to reload, since it precaches different parts of your web app. This means that if someone wants to access your web app multiple times, they’ll be able to do that without having to wait for the page to load every time.

3. No network? No problem.

Another amazing feature of PWAs is understanding the state of each user’s network connection. Once it recognizes a poor connection, it starts working in offline mode, which allows the user to keep browsing no matter the area they’re in.

Every function of your PWA will continue to work so that your users enjoy an uninterrupted browsing experience. They can even place an order without a connection, which will be on stand-by until the PWA is back online.

4. Instant access

One way that a PWA can mimic a native app is the ability to add it to a user’s home screen and enable push notification. This means that the user won’t have to open their browser and go to your website every time they want to visit your shop.

Instead, an app-like icon will be right there on their home screen, which enables easy access. Better yet, full-screen mode is available as well, so the user can have a full app-like experience without having to actually download any apps.

The main benefit of this is an increase in engagement. This encourages repeated visits to your shops and makes it much easier for your customers to make purchases.

The final word

The buzz around PWAs started a couple of years ago, and now Magento is offering its users the chance to experience everything that these apps have to offer first-hand. If you’re in Early Adopter program, you might’ve already seen how powerful PWA Studio is.

If not, the official release of Magento 2.3 might be a turning point for your business. Once you get a taste of what PWAs can do for you, there’s a high chance you’ll wonder how your store could’ve survived without them.