Must-have PWA Features for Your eCommerce Website
PWA has proved that it is beyond technology hype by backing various eCommerce businesses’ success, including Tinder, Trivago, and Twitter. Yet to fully transform your PWA into a customer-centric eCommerce system, your development team needs to work on various integrations of extra features to optimize PWA to the fullest.
Which features would help to ramp up your eCommerce website’s capabilities? And how would they promote engagement with customers? Let’s check out these high-converting features for your PWA system.
1. Mobile-first Interface
Built primarily for mobile, PWAs require a mobile-first approach when it comes to user interface design. By aligning its components with the mobile device’s unique features, you can tailor the PWA interface to mobile users. It’s important to forget about conventional web design when designing for a PWA.
In terms of experience, A PWA is much like a typical native app from the user’s point of view. So it’s great to take native app design as inspiration and benchmark to build an app-like interface. Your PWA should be built around user expectation of a native app to reach its full potential and deliver a mobile-first experience in your online store.
2. SEO-friendly for search engine optimization
One of the most significant advantages of the PWA web is the ability to discover sites and apps through search. In fact, more than half of all website traffic comes from organic search. Making sure that canonical URLs exist for content and that search engines can index your site is critical for users to be able to find your PWA. This is especially true when adopting client-side rendering.
Start by ensuring that each URL has a unique, descriptive title and meta description. Then you can use the Google Search Console, and the Search Engine Optimization audits in Lighthouse to help you debug and fix discoverability issues with your PWA. You can also use Bing’s or Yandex webmaster tools and consider including structured data via schemas from Schema.org in your PWA.
3. Security of Business Data
Progressive Web Apps are served over HTTPS, a connection that ensures maximum security and privacy for the users and site data. HTTPS is designed to withstand man-in-the-middle attacks. In computer security, a man-in-the-middle attack happens when the attacker secretly relays and alters the communication between two parties who believe they are directly communicating with each other.
A PWA has a secure connection that protects sensitive information. This way, the user and the session do not get exposed to these attacks and other vulnerabilities.
4. Push Notification for Engagement
Are you looking for a way to raise customer engagement? If yes, then Push notifications PWA is definitely one of the most-used features. Even when the PWA browser is not running, or the customer is in offline mode, they can still receive your messages.
Don’t worry that you may disturb or annoy customers in their personal life. In order to activate this function, you’ll need users’ permission beforehand. Since Google always wants to provide the best customer experience, all the PWA features will not create any inconvenience to users.
5. Add to Homescreen
Once a customer reaches a certain level of engagement, you can prompt them to add a shortcut from the PWA to their phone’s home screen — giving it — and your brand — the same visibility and fast access as a native app. The home screen is a sought-after piece of digital real estate — a trusted spot in people’s lives. Having your logo icon there is like a constant billboard, keeping you top of mind.
6. Web Payment for Conversion
Checkout forms are one of the main accused of page abandonment even for PWA, and people find it like a Pan’s Labyrinth— very difficult to get across it to the next page. They have always been tedious, demand a lot of manual interaction, move at a slow pace, and need many taps. Slow checkouts have always affected your business, and its generational tale says all about it.
Setting up the fourth generational checkout window, Payment Request API or WP3 API, abolishes the need for checkout forms and standardizes the payment collection for websites. If you are disgusted with intricate checkouts, Payment Request API makes payment a cakewalk process for you, eventually bringing down cart abandonment numbers.
The given Request API adds more life to Progressive Web Applications, which already possess all the life of the world, i.e., your mobile shopping experience is going to be lightning quick. The passing of credentials from browser to merchant has been an arduous task till now; however, with Payment Request API, a merchant can get necessary credit card details from any browser with ease.
7. Live Chat
Your PWA website should not only load fast but also need to produce a quick response to customer queries for a seamless customer experience, as 53% of customers are likely to abandon their online purchases if they can’t find quick answers to their questions (Forrester). And live chat plays a vital role in helping businesses to accomplish such a goal.
A study by eMarketer found that more than 60% of consumers would return to a website offering live chat. Acquire believes live chat is one of the best customer service options available. More than 30% of consumers find live chat more informative and helpful than emails or phone calls. And more than 79% of consumers feel they found quick answers that impacted their buying decisions.
Moreover, the more personal and direct form of communication provided by live chat creates deeper customer relationships. In the long run, these relationships become more and more loyal, creating additional revenue on the back of them.
For personalized advice and a clear outline for how to get the most out of a PWA for your business, talk to one of our experts today.
