Shoper introduces a PWA feature for its stores. How will it benefit retailers and their customers?

An online store that you access as if it were an app on your phone - that's how PWA, a new feature of Shoper, can be described in a nutshell. Its launch is very simple, and the company's experts explain what can be gained from it.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is a technology developed in 2015 to create web apps that load like regular web pages. Smartphone users are reluctant to use browsers to access their favorite websites - they prefer apps for specific tasks. For web developers, on the other hand, writing a separate app is always more challenging than optimizing a website to be responsive. PWA allows both sides to meet each other halfway.

Thanks to the use of PWA, the sites work similarly to mobile sites, but run like apps. The new feature can be used by any e-commerce site running on the Shoper platform under a subscription model.

After all, it's the year of mobile!

Data from Shoper shows that in the last 12 months as many as 54 percent of users visited stores using the platform using mobile devices. This proportion increased by 8 percent compared to the same period a year ago in favor of smartphones and tablets. The trend is confirmed by Gemius data. According to them, in May this year the number of website views from mobile devices on the Polish Internet exceeded the number of hits from computers for the first time. Analysis of Shoper also shows that the smartphone is the device for which the number of transactions is growing the fastest (10.5 percent per year).

- Easy access to online shopping from a smartphone is quickly becoming a standard that shoppers expect. Taking advantage of PWA will be trivial for them. They will see a special banner on the website supporting the new technology. After clicking it, a store icon will appear next to their favorite applications on the smartphone's start screen. Browsing resources will become much more convenient," says Mariusz Charkot, Product Manager, at Shoper.

The Shoper expert adds that it will also be very intuitive for retailers to activate the PWA service. - It is enough for the seller to define the parameters describing the application in the store's administration panel. To do so, he or she should perform a multi-step configuration and have the SSL certificate enabled. From then on, the store will be available to mobile device users in the form of a PWA application ," explains Mariusz Charkot.

Increase store performance and customer conversions

Shoper expects most of the more than 10,000 stores operating on the platform to make their PWA applications available to customers in the coming weeks.

- The solution we are introducing is still relatively unknown on the Polish market. However, anyone who launches the service will quickly see the benefits associated with it. PWA brings stores a real increase in engagement among shoppers. The implementation of this feature by Flipkart - India's most popular marketplace - proves that users who start their interaction with an e-store from the app icon on their phone have up to 70 percent higher conversions than those acquired through other channels, Mariusz Charkot emphasizes.

The PWA application also has the advantage of making the store smoother and more comfortable to navigate compared to sites operating in the traditional way. This is especially noticeable when working on a weak Internet connection - browsing the store using PWA does not require downloading full data from the server at each subsequent view if the user has already visited it before. It is therefore faster and possible even in offline mode.