Could PWAs be the face of SMBs and Start-ups?
For any startup, gaining a customer and then growing its customer base is the hardest thing. The competition is getting stiffer and challenging as technology is evolving day by day.
Change is inevitable, the growth at which technology is changing is exponential, everyday new technology gets evolved so to hold the ground lot’s of effort and investment is required. One has to be smart for surviving in this longer run.
Evolving with technology requires a lot of investment which doesn’t seem to be of any problem to large businesses, but startups suffer as they have limited resources.
“So how does a startup survive? What’s the mantra?”
For any start-up to survive, the initial two years are the hardest. According to a research one-third of the start-ups don’t make it past the two-year mark. The first year is all about foundation and establishment, whereas the second year is all about getting traction.
Websites play an important role in setting up any business it’s the initial door to success. An appealing website homepage and user-friendly experience set everything up. But the real question still exists, does a website really helps?
“If not a website, what then?” Mobile App?
Having a mobile application increases one’s reach to customers, and it’s quite a trend for a company to have one. Companies today love to have a mobile app for all platforms as it increases their reach and generates a lot of traffic. Not only traffic, but it has also helped them to improve their conversion rate.
It does seem to be a fairy tale for a start-up, as higher the conversion rate, higher is the profit.
Wait, what if I told you that it’s just one half of the story? Strange, but true. Here’s some mind-blowing fact which we overlook most of the time.
From a business perspective, if we talk about cities, tier 2 and tier 3 hold the maximum number of viable customers. It’s one of the highest priority for any b2b or b2c start-ups to target these customers.
It does sound pretty cool for any start-up to grow their businesses in these cities, as they can reach to a maximum number of customers. Considering these facts and launching an app on multiple platforms seems to solve any start-up problems, doesn’t it? Aren’t we arriving at a conclusion too fast? But that’s what we were talking earlier about having viable customers and generating maximum traffic, a goal for any start-up.
Now, let me reveal a sad truth. Just having a large number of viable customers doesn’t solve any problem.
“Having a large number of customer leads to higher traffic, and that ultimately leads to increase in conversion”.
Looks great! but on paper, yeah that’s the sad truth
Tier 2 and tier 3 cities more often suffer due to flaky networks and businesses have noted higher bounce rates. Less or no connectivity tends to lower generation of traffic, and that highly reflects in conversion ratio.
Not only start-ups, other brands too face the similar problem. OLA, the leading Indian cab aggregator, faced a similar situation in dealing with tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Not just OLA, BookMyShow too received higher bounce rate in these tiers.
Network connectivity is one issue, another major issue is storage. People in these tiers generally have low-end phones, and as we all know, low-end smartphones suffer a lot due to storage, so a user is left with no option than to compromise on storage and uninstall the app that isn’t of much use. Another major issue low-end smartphone have is the consumption of RAM, apps tend to consume a large part of RAM and making the whole user experience a tiresome one.
Companies have noted uninstallation problem quite many times, even BookMyShow has faced the similar problem.
Here are some of the major problem faced by the different companies.
OLA
OLA, an online transportation company, is the leading cab aggregator in India. It has expanded to a network of more than 6,00,000 vehicles.
Network connectivity, low storage and slow processors, these issues have always been an area of concern for OLA in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. These tiers cities provide a large customer base, so to improve its users reach, OLA needed a different strategy to work.
BookMyShow
BookMyShow, India’s largest online ticket and event booking platform have more than 40 million monthly visitors. Having those numbers for a month is itself an achievement, though the company still encountered high bounce rates.
“People were using the native app and were happy with it, but their main concerns were the data usage and memory it consumes” -Anish Tripathi, Vice President of design.
OLX
OLX suffered high bounce rates as their mobile web experience was too slow. Another major problem faced by OLX was the slow loading of ads, and it led to lower the revenue.
ONE SOLUTION FOR ALL
One thing was common in all, companies were looking for an alternate solution for the drawbacks of native apps. So, they started to invest in Progressive Web Apps, and as a result, they improved their conversion rate, user engagement and traffic generation.
The Progressive Web Apps features are far more engaging by providing faster speed, better connectivity, instant page loading, enhanced accessibility, and reliability. PWAs offer an interactive user experience further facilitated by features such as web push notifications, full-screen mode and home screen shortcuts.
To top it up, PWAs have simple updates that are secure and do not require the user to re-upload apps. PWAs are the ideal solution for any SMBs and start-ups as it helps them to increase the engagement and subsequently the revenue. That is why PWA can be the future.
About Me
I’m a Digital Marketer at Widely, and I am super enthusiastic about PWA. The journey of PWA has just begun, and it has already started to make its space in the app domain. Companies have already started to invest in this new technology. It will be interesting to see whether PWA will completely replace native apps or not?
Reach out to Widely to upgrade your website into Progressive Web App in minutes and to know more about it.
Thanks, Anshuli Gupta for proofreading and co-authoring the article with me. Being somebody new into expressing my knowledge via write-ups, it was extremely useful.
