I’ve recently read that 2018 is a year of Progressive Web Apps. It’s like a teenage sex: everybody is reading about it, thinking about it but there are not so many cases to benchmark with. Especially in European Retail.
Why is that? I think like with any new technology the barrier is a tendency to avoid risk. It’s understandable that nobody is willing to put the well-doing business at stake trying something new. I can say that there is another way — risk-free — to check the business benefits of PWA.
PWA - it’s a Proof of Concept
Right now, when we have Magento 1.x, and Magento 2.x connectors for Alokai — first PWA for eCommerce doing some PoC version is a matter of few working days — maybe too few weeks with some custom features on board.
PWA - how can it look like?
In the minimal scope Proof of Concept can be just a Alokai instance with changed logo and modified CSS (colors) to show Your stakeholders that are running very smoothly — great on mobile — worth investing more.
It can be done in one, two working days.
Then, You can just import your products from Magento1 or Magento2, or add them even manually in the Magento panel. Cool mobile app with your products — we’re close to deploying it to the users ;)
The integration shouldn’t have taken more than the next 5–10 days — depending on the need of just importing the products catalog vs. bi-directional sync (orders, users, carts). Basic integration with Magento 1 / Magento 2 is just a matter of a few hours spent on configuration.
Then one can invest in the redesign and customize the UI. Alokai themes mechanism allows You to create totally custom markup — look and feel without modifying the core.
The whole process (with UI) should take no more than 4–6 weeks, and You get the working Proof of Concept with modern UI that can be tested with real users. For example, running this version on the subdomain and putting there some group (20–40%) of mobile users.
PWA edge cases
If the thing is that you’ve pretty customized checkout process — we’ve done few PoCs where the only catalog has been entirely moved to Alokai. The checkout is still running on the existing Magento (carts are synced up, and by clicking “Go to Checkout” user gets to the RWD version of your current checkout). No business risks, improved UX for a like 90% of time spent on site by the users (browsing products).
Summary
By doing the PoC you invest no more than 20–40 working days and have clear data for further decisions: if the CR is higher, how users behave on this improved mobile edition.
Next steps
We can do a free Scoping Session workshops with our UX designer and architect to estimate Your project. Contact us !
