There is a shift in online marketplaces. Online shops, instead of building new mobile apps, are moving to a much simpler solution. They use PWAs to build online shops directly in a browser. Let’s take a look at the best of them.
The Online Marketplaces
The online marketplaces are like traditional market squares in the cities – they are great, they gather diversified products, from many suppliers and they deliver them to customers. What’s even greater is that they do it 24/7, worldwide.
The competition for online marketplaces is massive and will continue to grow in the future. The stakes are high – as Statista estimates – global eCommerce sales worldwide will reach $4.48 trillion in 2021. The most dynamic changes are expected in the Asian market. Some enterprises make their point of sale networks more complex by adding tools like native apps or social marketplaces (look at Facebook marketplace). Some others keep it simple.
The Great Shift towards PWAs
Modern online marketplaces are moving towards the new concept of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). This makes the buying & selling process simpler and more accessible for customers. With PWAs, you don’t need to adjust your eCommerce mobile apps to Android or iOS operating systems, nor distribution platforms. Instead of that, you use modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like experience to your customers which is cheaper than native apps, safe, and super fast at the front-end. And it can work offline.
Let’s check how top eCommerce businesses use PWAs development for ecommerce and what they gained – by the TOP 30 PWA benchmarking study.
Learn more in The Beginners Guide to PWA.
TOP marketplaces on PWA
AliExpress
Traffic: 666.50M
AliExpress.com is a marketplace offering products to international online buyers. Their mobile commerce is growing three times faster than eCommerce. AliExpress decided to build a cross-browser Progressive Web App to combine the best of their app with the broad reach of the web.
Results:
- 104% more new users across all browsers
- 82% increase in iOS conversion rate
- 2x more pages visited per session per user across all browsers
- 74% increase in time spent per session across all browsers
Jumia
Traffic: 5.6M
Jumia.com.ng is a leading eCommerce website in Africa. In Jumia’s main market, most of the mobile connections are on 2G networks. That’s why users only have intermittent connectivity and visit the site from low-end phones with data limitations.
Jumia Travel has enhanced and optimized all the various elements of their PWA experience. The company noticed a huge increase in conversion rates compared with the previous mobile website.
Results:
- 33% higher conversion rate
- 50% lower bounce rate
- 12x more users versus native apps (Android & IOS)
- 5x less data used
Alibaba
Traffic: 155.6M
Alibaba.com is the world’s largest online business-to-business trading platform serving 200+ countries and regions. After upgrading their site to a PWA, the company saw a huge increase in total conversions across browsers.
Results:
- 76% higher conversions across browsers
- >14% more monthly active users on iOS
- 30% more monthly active users on Android
- 4X higher interaction rate from Add to Homescreen
5miles
Traffic: 2.0M
5miles.com is a mobile marketplace, where shoppers can buy almost everything. They decided to build a PWA to combine the best of their app with the broad reach of the web. The company wanted to re-engage their mobile web users just as they would with mobile app users.
Results:
- 50% decrease in bounce rates
- 30% increase in time spent on site
- 30% better conversion for users who arrived via Add to Home screen
Flipkart
Traffic: 258.4M
Flipkart.com is India’s largest eCommerce site. They decided to combine their web presence and native app into a PWA, which has resulted in a big increase in conversions.
Results:
- 3X more time spent on site
- 40% higher re-engagement rate
- 70% greater conversion rate among those arriving via Add to Homescreen
- 3X lower data usage
OLX
Traffic: 40.7M
Olx.in is one of the largest online destinations for classified ads in India, which provides communities in high-growth markets with vibrant online marketplaces. OLX wanted to re-engage mobile web users, so they looked to PWA technologies to provide a faster-loading, immersive and app-like experience.
Results:
- 23% less time until a page is interactive
- 80% lower bounce rates
- 146% higher CTR on Ads
- 250% more re-engagement
Konga.com
Traffic: no data
Konga.com is a leading eCommerce website in Nigeria and its largest source of traffic and user growth is provided by mobile devices. Konga wanted to provide all of their web users with the benefits of their app, including performance, the ability to work offline and re-engage without the data cost.
Results:
- 92% less data for initial load, vs. native app
- 82% less data to complete first transaction, vs. native app
- 63% less data for initial load, vs. previous mobile web experience
- 84% less data to complete first transaction, vs. previous mobile web experience
The PWA for all industries
The implementation of the presented 7 marketplaces proves that using PWAs improves the online shopping experience and provides a measurable improvement in the experiences of customers worldwide. The positive effects are clear – the better return on investment, conversion rate growth, reduction in application weight, and an increase in the number of users.
The boost in customers’ engagement is also observed in social media, entertainment, beauty, food, and technology sectors. Their success stories can be found in the TOP 30 PWA benchmarking study.
Learn more about PWAs and open source solutions:
Published May 4, 2018
