Magento PWA Studio: Creating Next Generation Shopping Experiences

The modern-age customer is highly tech-savvy and expects a top level of customer experience, especially when it comes to shopping online. The eCommerce platforms need to be fast, user-friendly, and light to catch the eyeballs of the customers and survive in the high pressured market scenario. With the increasing influence of mobile over the eCommerce arena, updating eCommerce according to the likes of the customer has become paramount.

To develop an impeccable eCommerce platform, Progressive Web Applications (PWA) has emerged as the latest buzzword in the business realm. The PWA technology has gained momentum because of its capabilities of transforming how eCommerce business merchants do their business across their mobile devices.

So, before digging into the concept of PWA in Magento 2.3, let us first understand the PWA technology in a nutshell.

What is Progressive Web Applications?

Google introduced PWA in the year 2015. It is a perfect blend of mobile apps and web pages. With PWA, the users can experience all the features of a mobile app in a web application.

Lack of user engagement on the mobile platform related to e-Commerce was the main reason which led to the development of Progressive Web Applications (PWA). Despite having a massive amount of traffic, eCommerce platforms on mobile apps had only a 13% customer engagement rate. Thus, the need to capitalize on the mobile market was the pushing factor behind the development of Progressive Web Applications. There is a gradual increase in the trend where businesses are looking for top PWA development companies to start early with the development.

PWA is a comprehensive method in which the user will get to enjoy the website and mobile app in one package. Moreover, by implementing PWA, you can make the customers revisit your eCommerce website by providing richer customer experiences, offers through push notifications, and continuous background synchronization.

What is Magento PWA Studio?

Magento PWA Studio is a defined collection of developer tools through which the process of deployment, development, and maintenance of the online store as a PWA storefront. Here, Magento works on the principle of extensibility and the Magento PWA Studio uses modern libraries and tools to build an e-commerce platform that stands by this principle.

Many tech pundits believe that Magento PWA Studio is the ‘next big thing’ in the realm of mobile and web. The reason behind this is, PWA allows to create a small icon that can be used by the user to access the website irrespective of the OS platform that he or she is working on.

Let us see some of the tools and libraries used to develop and build a Magento PWA studio in order to increase the user experience.

• Webpack
  The main function of the webpack tool is to merge the scripts that are being used in the Magento PWA Studio. The PWA Buildpack CLI tools contain the main build of the Magento PWA and the development tools. The webpack tools gear up the development environment for the Magento PWA.
• Hooks
  The greatest advantage that the Hooks library provides developers is the freedom to use State and all the other react features without the need to define a class. The developers should be fully aware of using Hooks in order to extract the most from the library.
• JavaScript
  The primary language used in the development of the PWA Magento Studio Project is JavaScript. Great hands-on experience with JavaScript is needed for the developer to work properly on the Magento PWA Studio. JavaScript helps the developers to make sure that the compatibility of the website is consistent irrespective of the device that it has been accessed through and the backend development of the Magento PWA Studio is done by using node.js.

Importance of developing an online store through Magento PWA Studio

Magento PWA helps in enhancing the credibility and accessibility of the online store in a plethora of ways. Let us look at some of the common reasons why you should opt for Magento PWA Studio for your online store.

• Fast Browsing: Magento PWA Studio rectifies the poor response time by offering instant loading, impressive speed, and fast UI usability. With the PWA pre-caches, it allows even better speed to users when they visit the same web pages again. Hence, it increases user retention and provides a more seamless experience. It also helps in streamlining the services and the API storage on the client-side.
• Cost Efficiency: With Magento PWA Studio, your online store can run on all the leading OS platforms such as Android and iOS. Therefore, you don’t need to build separately in order to cater to a large quantity of audience. Moreover, it has a well defined PWA architecture that doesn’t consume much time and efforts of the web developers.

E-Commerce experience Revolutionized by Implementation of PWA in Magento 2.3

Having got a better insight about the common reason, let us now look at more niche reasons to opt for Magento PWA Studio for your online store,

Platform Compatibility

Progressive Web Applications can run on almost all platforms, which includes Edge, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. PWAs have single web code which is enough to run across all platforms and includes desktops as well. Thus, eCommerce developers don’t need to develop the eCommerce platform separately for different systems and devices. In addition to this, all the updates can be sent in real-time, just like we do for the websites. Cross-platform compatibility also decreases the time cycle for product development. Therefore, you can release your product at a rapid pace skipping the waiting time required for the approvals on app stores, and all this without compromising on quality or features.

Responsive Design

With the inclusion of PWA, your eCommerce platform will provide a smoother user experience across all the devices that work through Magento. The customer experience will increase because of the responsive design as the users can access the e-commerce platform from their preferred device. Moreover, according to Google, the website with responsive designs rank better on the SERPs. Therefore, with PWA in action, your website will have a higher rank and visibility as compared to your peers. A Higher Google rank will expand your business as your targeted customers will have a better chance to see you.

Keeping Pace with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With PWA, your web apps become way more reliable and engaging, and it increases the number of visitors to your websites and improves the chances of retaining them. According to Google, the mobile version of a website is indexed first and considered for ranking on the SERPs the eCommerce platform thus will have a higher chance of ranking higher, and thus with SEO, the eCommerce platform will be among the top-ranked ones in the industry.

A mobile-friendly version will help the e-commerce platform to work well in getting higher rankings and expanding your business. In addition to this, the work done by eCommerce platform owners to separately market to reach out to their audience on various platforms is reduced with Magento PWA Studio, and now they will have the liberty to focus more on the web app and gain even more footfall on their eCommerce platforms.

Better Security to the E-Commerce Platform

There is two-factor authentication which plays a significant part in reducing the probability of password hacking or attacks by bots on your eCommerce platform. Moreover, Magento has added Google ReCaptcha that saves the website and the mobile app from attacks of automated devices and keeps the data intact and safe.

Rapid browsing and App Gratification

The Magento stores can interact with the customers in a swifter yet accurate manner with the help of Progressive Web Applications (PWA). With better speed, the customer conversion rate will increase as the customers will find it easy and time-efficient to interact with your eCommerce platform.

The PWAs make the mobile apps instantly discoverable on the platform, and thus it eliminates the need for installing or downloading a new application before usage. This process saves time for your user and makes the eCommerce platform less tedious.

Also Read:-  Features To Consider During eCommerce Platform Selection

Push Notifications

You can send information about all your latest offers in a personalized manner through push notifications to your customers. Apart from offers, push notifications can give a short glimpse of deals and updates on the platform. As push notifications provide real-time and contextual information in a personalized manner to the customer, there are high chances of increasing customer engagement. Researches show that customer engagement shoots up to 88% because of personalized push notifications.

Providing all the Modern Tools

Amalgamating PWA with Magento 2.3 will give your eCommerce platform all the advanced tools such as Venia Storefront, Peregrine, and PWA-builder pack. These tools help to create and design the e-commerce platform in the most competent manner. The PWA builder pack will have the main development tools for developing the Magento PWA. Whereas, Venia Storefront will create Magento Storefront by utilizing all the different PWA Studio tools. The Peregrine tool will give competent UI components that will be used to design the Magento PWA.

Moreover, apart from the tools, PWA will provide the best Magento developers with powerful libraries so that they can use their knowledge and creativity to make user-friendly and state-of-art features.

Must Read: Guide To eCommerce App Development

Final Take

To put it very simply, we can say that Progressive Web Applications (PWA) is the future of the eCommerce platform. It will give a plethora of opportunities to eCommerce merchants, which will help them to increase their customer base and expand their business in different directions. Integrating PWA with Magento 2.3 will revolutionize and bring a paradigm shift in the customer experience of many eCommerce companies. In all, it will be a win-win situation for both the eCommerce merchants and the customers.

Gillian Harper   |  Jun 26, 2020

A professionally engaged blogger, an entertainer, dancer, tech critic, movie buff and a quick learner with an impressive personality! I work as a Senior Process Specialist at Topdevelopers.co as I can readily solve business problems by analyzing the overall process. I’m also good at building a better rapport with people!