Virtual Mart is one of Jamaica’s largest online food and grocery store. In alliance with a number of players within the grocery sector of Jamaica, it is ready to provide over 3,000 daily needs items from over 100 brands in the catalog.

Household consumers will find a wide and carefully selected variety to satisfy shopping convenience. From fresh fruits and vegetables, rice, sugar, beans, meats, spices, and seasonings to packaged products, alcoholic beverages, personal care products, and household items.

Jamaica is a growing economy and there has been continuous growth of online businesses, especially for small scale enterprises and companies. With over 95% of mobile penetration, Jamaica has a fully digital telephone communication system.

In 2007, the Jamaica E-transaction Act came into effect, providing the legal framework for secure electronic commerce. Since then, e-commerce has grown in significance, with a larger number of businesses (particularly utilities and banks) offering the option to pay bills online or via mobile phone.

Godfrey Salmon is the Managing Director at Virtual Mart Jamaica. He was looking for a solution to provide grocery shopping convenience on mobile devices. As most of the Jamaican holds a smartphone, this was a good strategy to dive into m-commerce and widen the sales channel.

Virtual Mart is running a successful grocery shopping website built on the Magento digital commerce platform. Although the website is fully responsive and supports mobile resolution, yet it doesn’t provide a true mobile app experience.

Building a native mobile application is a complex process and takes huge time and resources. However, there is an easy solution, a PWA (or Progressive Web Application) can be used instead. PWA combines modern web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS) and delivers engaging content to users.

To know more about PWA, please visit – https://mobikul.com/progressive-web-app/

Progressive Web Apps technology has been used in different markets for tapping mobile consumers. AliExpress, BookMyShow, Flipkart, OLX, Trivago, Twitter, Uber, Walmart, Wego, and many other big companies are using PWA.

Flipkart Lite is one of the best examples of PWA. Flipkart’s web app resulted in 70% conversions and increased the users’ time on mobile from 70 seconds to 3.5 minutes.

Moreover, with Flipkart’s expertise in PWA and data analytics know-how, Walmart wanted to optimize the mobile and desktop online shopping experience. Right now, Walmart is using Progressive Web App technology for Walmart Grocery, visit grocery.walmart.com and click Add to Home Screen.

With Webkul’s Magento 2 Progressive Web Application extension, you can get easily create PWA for your online store. After installing this Magento extension, you need to do some configuration from the backend and then you’re ready to go.

The configuration is a simple process, all you need to do is get Firebase API credentials and enter it below as visible in the screenshots. To read Magento 2 PWA installation guide, click here.

Furthermore, you can choose the splash background color, theme color, and upload the application icon. These options are useful for making your PWA app customizable as per your online store colors/theme.

Progressive Web Apps provide an installable, app-like experience on desktop and mobile that are built and delivered directly via the web. They are web apps that are fast and reliable. And most importantly, being web apps they work in any browser.

For downloading the PWA, a user simply needs to find and click Add to Home Screen option. After that, the PWA icon and name appears, the app name can be changed as well.

Unlike, regular mobile app, the PWA doesn’t need to be published via digital distribution systems like Apple App Store or Google Play. Further PWA supports various web browsers and mobile operating system (Android/iOS):

• Microsoft Edge
• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Apple Safari

The progressive web app offers all the e-commerce store features from signing in to an existing account or create a new account. Further, it also supports social login functionality.

PWAs are known for supporting poor networking connectivity and low bandwidth consumption. This is very useful for emerging countries such as Jamaica or India, where people still use 2G or 3G handset devices.

Also, the PWA app size is very little and takes very less storage space. With the help of Service Workers, PWA precaches the content when it connected and loads it instantly when a user visits it again. Due to this, PWA offers a speedy experience for poor or unreliable networks.

The progressive web application also offers to send push notification messages. From the backend admin panel, you can create a custom message with title, content, and upload an icon.

Virtual Mart offers a delivery slot selection for an order. Using Magento 2 Delivery Date and Time extension, the customers can choose their preferred product delivery date and time slot available.

Delivery date and time information are visible on the order information section and sales order email. After selecting the delivery slot, Virtual Mart’s customers can also pay at home using a debit/credit card.

For maintaining the timely delivery of all the orders, Virtual Mart uses the order threshold per slot. With Delivery Date & Time extension, the admin can specify the maximum number of orders that can be accepted for a slot.

After that, only the available slots are visible at the checkout. If you like to know more about the Virtual Mart Jamaica PWA app, you can their website and tap Add to Home Screen from your mobile phone or desktop web browser.

Want to read another success story from Jamaica?, then view CoolMarket.

• https://virtualmartja.com/guide
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica#Communication
• https://jis.gov.jm/electronic-transactions-act-will-revolutionize-way-business-is-conducted/
• https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps
• https://developers.google.com/web/showcase/2016/flipkart
• https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/walmart-to-tap-flipkarts-tech-expertise/67017317
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_applications