Offline first approach to e-commerce
Date posted
30 November 2015
Reading time
8 Minutes
Offline first approach to e-commerce
Last week myself and another Kainos employee, Matthew Fitch, attended the first #EcomHackBelfast ran by Chain Reaction Technology the technology department of Chain Reaction Cycles. This was a two-day hackathon that was based around coming up with and building ideas around e-commerce.
Before the hackathon we decided on a number of ideas including:
Something that our solution provided was an opportunity for customers to be browsing the products, which you usually aren't able to do on a normal e-commerce web application. However, we wanted a way to turn those potential customers into money spending customers. The problem though is that you can't pay for something when there is no internet connection. The next best option was to ask the customers if they wanted to be notified when connectivity had restored so they could continue with their order. This would allow us to increase conversion and ultimately allow the customer to spend money.
To do this we used another one service worker's features that allows you to send a push notification from a website, even if the browser isn't active and the phone is locked. This technology is very new but sites like Facebook are already using it.
The end result was something like this.
We were pretty proud of what we did in such a short space of time. The result of our hard work was that we ended up the winning team and took home the top prize of £1,000. The final solution can be seen here.
If you have any questions, suggestions or ideas, please leave a comment!
- VR for viewing different bikes and accessories to give the customer a more personal and immersive experience when shopping.
- Using beacon technology with an associated mobile app to allow users to interact with in store products and get more information, reviews and alternatives.
Slow-loading websites cost retailers £1.73bn in lost sales each year.
So how can providing an offline first approach help this? It's simple. Instead of making the perilous journey across the internet every time we can go to our cached content first. This means we can put content on the screen straight away. In the background we can fetch any fresh content and update the user interface appropriately. This approach slashes load time dramatically. Another problem that is particularly relevant to ecommerce applications is;88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.
So how does our offline approach create a better user experience? Well, first and foremost, the performance gains we already discussed provide a great experience for the user. However, there are other ways that the offline first approach provides a better experience for the user;- No data loss users trust our app far more.
- Consistent experience not dependant on network.