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For today’s online consumer, shopping is a lengthy, multi-channel, multi-device activity.
Research, consideration, and eventually purchase – all are key touchpoints in the purchasing cycle.
The fact that 90% of customers expect smooth interactions across multiple channels and devices highlights the importance of this omnichannel readiness.
By harnessing the latest in eCommerce technology, eCommerce businesses can provide their customers with what they want, when they want, but perhaps most importantly, where they want it.
And, there’s no denying that the growth of mobile shopping shows no signs of slowing.
According to Statista, by the end of 2020, 73% of e-commerce sales will take place on a mobile device. As buyers become increasingly comfortable with banking, browsing and purchasing on mobile devices, businesses that fail to cater to this will be left behind.
Despite a clear consumer preference for mobile solutions, mobile conversion rates remain less than half that of desktop. While research also indicates that 53% of consumers will abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.
In the world of eCommerce, small margins make big differences – having a responsive eCommerce website design simply doesn’t cut it anymore
The development of Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and similar technologies are allowing eCommerce brands to provide a truly optimal mobile experience. PWAs offer a native-like mobile experience, along with features such as push notifications and instant loading. All of which contribute to an improved customer journey.
PWAs also unlock opportunities for a headless commerce strategy – allowing teams to work on the front-end and back-end of their systems simultaneously.
A PWA can further be utilized with an accelerated mobile page (AMP); a mobile-first, stripped-down HTML copy of a web page that loads instantly. AMPs constitute the bedrock of Google’s mobile-first index, which ranks sites based on mobile optimization in its search results.
By combining both AMP and PWA (and a robust content marketing strategy), eCommerce brands can:
- rank higher in search results,
- gain more top-of-funnel traffic, and,
- ultimately improve conversation rates onsite.
For example, Thrillist, an online lifestyle media brand, updated its site to incorporate AMP compatibility and achieved a 70 percent lift in traffic, with 50 percent of that growth directly attributable to AMP.
Meanwhile, Trivago, the travel app, increased engagement by 150% through its utilization of PWA. The PWA loads faster than the existing native app, has push notifications and an offline mode. With the Trivago PWA, customers now click on hotel offers twice as much as with the native app (97% increase).
