Rebuild your shop with PWA or traditional?

After several years of running your shop, you’ve decided that it’s time to rebuild it, so naturally, you’re researching what has changed since you decided on the technology you’ve chosen all those years ago.

You’re reading about new buzz words like PWA, Headless, Serverless, Microservices and wondering what the right solution is for you. You like technology as much as the next person, but your needs are ultimately business needs: increase conversions, keep costs under control and mitigate potential risks to your business.

In this article, we’ll try to explain what PWAs are, how they can help your business, and whether you should rebuild your shop using this technology.

What is PWA?

PWA or Progressive Web Apps is a way of building web applications that was first proposed by Google engineers in 2015 and gained popularity over the following years as the web browsers implemented the standards required.

The main advantages that this technology brings for online shops are:

• Fast load times & Offline support
• Installable
• Push notifications

Why as a merchant should you care about this? It’s been well known that fast loading websites lead to better user engagement and increased conversions, so the speed a PWA offers directly contributes to the bottom line. If the user installs your PWA on her phone, then she’s more likely to just tap that icon when she wants to buy again, rather than search for your shop on Google and be tempted by your competition. Finally, sending your customers push notifications is likely to re-engage them if used wisely.

So PWAs can lead to higher conversions and better re-engagement, so you might ask yourself why aren’t all shops already a PWA? What’s the catch? Progressive Web Apps are still a relatively new technology, so developing a PWA is still quite expensive. But more and more shops that are rebuilding nowadays already opt for this technology, so it’s expected for customers to get used to that speed and demand it.

Traditional shops can also be optimized to be fast, however they won’t be able to work with no or limited Internet connection, nor will they be installable on your customer’s phone. When developing a shop in-house however, traditional shops are today much cheaper than PWAs, but that gap is expected to close over time.

So should you go with PWA?

Our answer is yes.

We’ve built our Zento solution with a PWA frontend and a Magento 2 backend and offer it in a Software-as-a-Service business model because we believe that the future of eCommerce is SaaS and technically revolves around the advantages PWAs offer to the end-user.