Four Star Pizza Progressive Web App
We have been working with Four Star Pizza for over 3 years and one of the issues we have tried to solve is the one of creating a connection between the fourstarpizza.ie/co.uk website, used for general information and marketing campaigns, and the ordering engine which is hosted on a different platform.
The challenge has been creating one coherent journey for the user where we could, say, offer a voucher or a discount code in the fourstarpizza.ie website that the user can then consume in the ordering engine without having to copy/paste codes from one site to another.
The solution
Building a Progressive Web App (PWA: a website that can also be saved to the user’s home screen and looks and behaves as if it was a regular app) we managed to create that coherent journey.
The PWA replicates the main fourstarpizza.ie website functionalities, has promotional content in the front page, a store & menus functionality section, a section dedicated to contacts forms and a web ordering section that contains a view of the four star pizza ordering engine.
What the PWA also does is to create a unique identifier for each user when the app is installed, and through this identifier the Four Star Marketing team can then send promotional messages to each user distinctively using the push notification service.
Messages can contain offer codes that can be stored within the app and then consumed within the web ordering section, once the user reaches the checkout page.
The Results
When we launched the PWA at the beginning of December the results were immediately promising. Particularly useful was the lack of friction the user experienced in installing the app meant that the daily active users raised quite quickly.
We ran a survey a few weeks after the launch and some feedback indicated that although the PWA was very easy to install/use some users felt that having the usual app experience, downloading it from one of the stores, would have inspired more trust.
To answer that request, using the same codebase of the PWA and a software called Cordova, which allows the development of cross-platform apps from web based languages, HTML, Javascript CSS, we converted the app into a proper store app and distributed it onto the iOS and Android stores.
Try the PWA here, or get the store app for iOS from this link and for Android from this link.
Conclusions
PWA’s are a great way to create an app experience without having to develop a store app using native code.
The time and costs required to develop a PWA are significantly lower than developing a traditional app, making PWA the perfect technology to implement solutions for mobile devices quickly and efficiently.
This approach can be used as a way to test an app concept before deciding to invest into the development of a traditional app, or you can just fully invest into a PWA and forget about native apps.If you want to know more about PWA’s or you have an app idea that you may want to explore get in touch.
