For the fashion industry, mobile is super-important. There’s no doubt about the long hours that fashion lovers spend on mobile in search of the hottest trends, best collections and designers picks – but conversion rates for brands on mobile are usually lower than desktop. In this article, we’ll take a look at the reasons for this, and ways to improve conversion rates with a PWA.
The fashion industry, with its fast-changing trends and new collections, introduced a few times a season, is an extremely dynamic environment. Fashion customers buying power is growing, and by 2022, it should reach USD 1.2 billion. It’s an industry of first impressions and being on top is of the utmost importance for all players. Brands, media, and trendsetters use social media as a powerful tool to enchant customers and keep them up-to-date.
All leading social media platforms took the mobile-first approach. Many of them decided to use progressive web apps (Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram among them) to build a consistent user experience between different platforms and generate extremely valuable traffic for the fashion industry. For some eCommerce companies, Instagram generates over 70% of overall traffic – but it’s also about the quality of this traffic. Over 30% of Instagram users bought something that they saw first on Instagram.
Apart from building a community and advertising, social media supports brands multichannel strategies.
Some promising news for fashion brands is also that over 64% of mobile shoppers consult over their mobile phones before purchase. These are customers ready to buy.
Despite the high volume of generated traffic and users ready to purchase, many fashion brands fail to convert. The reason for that is the general gap of 47% between mobile and desktop conversions. This is a well-known phenomenon as for many years online stores were dedicated to desktop devices and as a result, it became a very serious bottleneck for mobile users. Accustomed to a seamless mobile experience users get stuck on online stores with poor mobile performance or not adjusted to mobile devices at all.
Why are PWAs so important for fashion?
Looking at social media success, fashion brands can increase mobile conversion by 30-40% just by implementing a PWA.
Progressive Web Apps, also known as PWAs, are modern web pages built with the mobile-first approach. PWAs have excellent performance, both on the desktop and mobile devices. What’s more, they work in offline mode and can be used as mobile apps. In short, thanks to PWA services, fashion brands can build only one webpage and use it in 3 ways: as a desktop webpage, mobile webpage, and mobile app.
Learn more about PWAs in The Beginner’s Guide To PWA.
The basic benefits of using a PWA in the fashion industry are clear. By implementing a Progressive Web App in online stores, fashion brands can reach out to a great number of users already engaged in social media and they can ensure their seamless transfer to transaction sites. What else?
Consistent offer on all platforms
Progressive Web Apps allow presenting the same offer and brands’ visual identity among all platforms and touchpoints. No matter if the user visits the mobile app or desktop store he will find a consistent selling platform and product that he saw in the other touchpoint.
Engaging in offline mode
PWAs use cache memory to support eCommerce platform speed when the Internet connection is low. Thanks to this same mechanism, it allows browsing the online store in offline mode. Now customers can search for their favorite products when commuting and losing connection every now and then.
Traffic peaks readiness
Another great thing provided by PWAs is stability in traffic peaks, like Black Friday or the Christmas Holidays. Because of service worker technology, eCommerce platforms built on PWAs are much safer when it comes to traffic overloads. So are you 100% Black Friday ready?!
Fashion brands with PWA
As the Top 30 PWAs Benchmarking Study reports: most companies have observed positive effects after implementing PWAs – conversion rate growth, reduction in application weight, or an increase in the number of users. Let’s check some examples directly from the fashion industry!
La Nature | Russia
La Nature is a top Russian eCommerce, offering splendid and original collections of jewelry and fashion accessories. The store selects exquisite international jewelry brands and presents over 16,000 products.
Thanks to its PWA, the La Nature store decreased loading time and used it to provide users with a native app-like experience on mobile devices.
Insights:
- leverages Magento 2.2 and Vue Storefront app
- switching catalog page time decreased by up to 0.1 second
- catalog first loading time (providing the visible part of the catalog with images) decreased by up to 1.5 seconds.
Read the La Nature case study | Visit the store: www.lanature.ru
Special Milano | Italy
Special Milano is an Italian streetwear specialist. The company offers its customers unique shoes and accessories from the best international brands like Nike, Adidas, Vans, Reebok. Having the store in Milano company decided to enter the online market and build unique user experience.
Before the full implementation of a PWA, Special Milano did a proof of concept. It turned out that developing a PWA was much cheaper than building a separate native app.
Insights:
- leverages Magento 2 and Vue Storefront
- the development process of the PoC took less than 20 working days
Read the Special Milano case study | Visit the store www.specialmilano.com
The Hour Glass | Singapore
The Hour Glass is one of Asia’s luxury watch retail groups. The group owns over 40 boutiques in 9 key cities in the Asia Pacific region. The Hour Glass is the official retailer for a carefully curated collection of luxury watches from more than 50 of the world’s finest watch brands such as Audemars Piguet, Cartier, Hublot, IWC, Patek Philippe, Richard Mille, Rolex, Sinn, TAG Heuer, and the like.
The PWA store has been launched for the NOMOS Glashütte watches and provides users with an elegant UX.
Visit the store www.nomosreddot.thehourglass.com
Published October 16, 2018
