Progressive Web App (PWA) For $1BN Business

Largest mid-Asian home electronics retailer Technodom.kz received a 26% conversion rate increase, sub-second page loading times, and a unified, platform-agnostic eCommerce experience after upgrading their eCommerce store to Progressive Web App (PWA).

12x faster – category page Time-to-Interactive
8x faster – product page Load Time
25,79% longer Average Time on Site
5,7% increase in Average Order Value
26% increase in Conversion Rate
Single team & single source code for Web, iOS & Android

Business Challenge

Founded in 2003 in Kazakhstan, Technodom is the biggest household appliance and home electronics retailer in Central Asia. With 84 physical stores and a solid online presence, their total annual revenue approaches $1BN with a substantial part of it coming from Internet sales.

In the spring of 2019, the company selected the solution to power its new storefront – ScandiPWA. It was initiated to renovate and re-engineer Technodom’s eCommerce platform to support drastic business expansion planned for the next 5 years. The goal was to surpass the negative effects on sales and business process, caused by outdated features and sub-optimal performance of the old solution. A special emphasis was put on creating a fast, versatile and reliable mobile customer experience.

Why PWA?

To implement a future-proof mobile-first approach, and to comply with the user experience best practices, the original intent was to build the new version of the store around a PWA.

Further, ScandiPWA – an open-source theme for Magento – was chosen as the specific solution. The reason is it offered full out-of-the-box support of PWA features critical for eCommerce. Besides, since by design ScandiPWA is a Magento theme, it has full access to the Magento eCommerce engine, using it as a back-end and data source. It simplified development for Technodom’s technical partner Scandiweb and decreased maintenance costs by several times.

Solution

Within six months, Scandiweb developed a robust, full-featured PWA solution. The core was composed of ScandiPWA as front-end, Magento 2 Community edition as a back-end, and Akeneo PIM Enterprise set to handle the main bulk of product information workflow.

PWA came as a replacement for the original native apps – both Android and iOS. The upgrade proved beneficial in a number of ways, showing improvements in speed and performance, as well as simplifying updates with single source code for both Apps.

With a catalog of 60,000 products across 35 regional stores, 15,000 attributes and 3,000+ categories on the front-end, PWA supported instant category browsing and helped decrease category page time-to-interactive by the factor of 12.

Being a platform-agnostic solution, PWA is built off of a single unified codebase. This eliminates platform-specific inconsistencies, minimizes the data-drain and download-related friction.

Browsing has been significantly improved to provide a smooth, fast, responsive experience. Artifacts such as page rendering and reflow issues are now in the past.

Another problem that is now history, is the need for periodic updates from an app store: PWA automatically updates in real-time like a regular website. Conveniently, for PWAs this is a technology-wide solution.

PWAs have been known to be quite particular in the way of rendering JS content for search engines. With this in mind, a custom PWA-specific dynamic rendering application was developed. This helped save resources on costly commercial pre-rendering services, reduced server load by enabling client-side rendering and assured effective JS content indexing by search engines.

Results

The resulting solution has been established as the world’s biggest PWA store on Magento, as per 2020. Not only was the transition to PWA a successful achievement, but the entire customer experience went through a positive evolution.

The tracked performance improvements show a 12x and 8x page-load speed increase for category and product pages accordingly, 26% conversion rate increase, and higher levels of user engagement. Additionally, the introduction of a unified code base and streamlined integration, speed up and simplify future development and maintenance.

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