Challenge
Aureate Lab’s client Rooted Objects is a curated online marketplace for independent, luxury and streetwear designers who create products with an original voice and aesthetic. Featuring a hand-picked selection of brands that are aligned to their design philosophy, Rooted Objects has a focus on sustainability and values. Their website was launched in September 2018 and soon became the go-to eCommerce site for customers who wanted sustainable fashion. The site features a neat, clean design where shoppers can buy from a range of fashion, lifestyle, home and beauty brands. When Rooted Objects assessed their conversion rates six months into launching the platform, they realized that slow web performance was a hindrance for mobile users and it had an impact on the shopping with dropped checkouts. They found a solution in a PWA built with Vue Storefront that brought speed, efficiency and mobile-shopping ease to their platform. The Rooted Objects website was well-received and attracted a fair amount of traffic. However, the conversion numbers told a different story. Upon tracking the analytics, the founders noticed that there were a lot of abandoned carts. People liked the products but more often than not the user journey didn’t translate into a sale. Further investigation revealed that the cause for these abandoned carts was poor website performance, especially on mobile devices. The existing solution was built on Magento 2, which is a powerful platform with a great range of plugins. However, when it comes to page performance on mobile devices, it was not delivering on expectations. eCommerce customers in India complete their shopping journey end-to-end largely on mobile devices, from product research to check out. Smartphone users have incredibly high-performance expectations from websites. Research from Google shows that 53% of users will desert a site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. eCommerce sites are typically weighty and users often shop in uncertain internet conditions. The decision-makers at Rooted Objects had found their answer: improve website performance and provide reliable, fast and immersive shopping experiences across devices.
Solution
Magento 2 Website to "PWA" When the founders brainstormed for potential solutions to optimize website performance across devices, they briefly considered building a native app. However, they soon rejected this idea because of the time, effort and expense involved. A new app would solve the immediate problem but not address the wider challenge. That of a fast, reliable and engaging user experience across web and mobile. Kiran had heard good things about the page performance of Progressive Web Apps. Coupled with Vue Storefront, PWA provided a robust yet breezy eCommerce experience that came through on the test of speed and UX. While Vue Storefront may be a relatively new solution, Rooted Objects were convinced to try it for several reasons. For one, Vue Storefront is platform-agnostic but designed with Magento in mind. Owing to the fact that it is headless and open source, it can be connected with any eCommerce platform successfully with much room for customization. It is ideal for migrations because you can easily migrate from one platform to another without disrupting your frontend. Additionally, it enjoys the support of a growing and large community. In a nutshell, Vue Storefront has cemented its position as the #1 Open Source PWA solution for eCommerce sites. And it is incredibly easy to use for developers. It can easily be installed on an internal company server. One can connect the source code with a vast number of eCommerce features. In addition, there are a number of components and elements that come straight out of the box. A highly active Vue community ensures that in case of doubt or complexity, developers can simply shout out for help and they can count on a reply from the core team members and contributors.
Results
Rooted Objects saw an immediate improvement in performance, soon after Vue Storefront implementation: Avg. page load time: -25.20% sec. Avg. redirection time: -80.49% sec. Predictably, speed has a direct impact on the rest of the metrics. Performance is not just an ultrafast front-end, it is also being available during traffic overloads, offering off-line shopping capabilities and always offering a smooth, native-like shopping experience. The results speak for themselves: Bounce rates: -9.98% Page/session: +21.04% Transactions: +133.33% Revenue: +44.05% eCommerce conversion rate: +161.68% Checkout abandonment dropped by 95.35%
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