• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 15, 2019

Magento, an Adobe company, on Tuesday announced the availability of a developer toolkit, designed to support progressive web apps (PWAs), an open standard initially spearheaded by Google that gives web pages running inside of a web browser the same quick experience a site visitor would have when running an app.

Most retailers are beginning to see more than half of their sales come through mobile devices. Performance -- for example, the time it takes a page to load in the browser -- continues to bring down conversion rates compared with desktop visits.

In the next few years, retailers will retire their existing websites and rebuild them as PWAs, said Peter Sheldon, senior director of strategy at Magento, an Adobe company.

Sheldon called PWAs an evolution of the front-end technology for websites, using JavaScript, HTML and other technology. The underlying browser technology changed to support a new way to serve websites.

During the holidays in 2018, companies experienced a 16.5% increase in ecommerce sales -- reaching about $126 billion, per Adobe Analytics. It was the first year the company measured a $2 billion day, rather than $1 billion days. With this much activity going through mobile and websites, companies need to ensure a better and faster experience for consumers.

Michael Klein, director of retail strategy of Adobe Experience Cloud, detailed other features introduced today in Adobe Experience Cloud. They all are aimed at helping retailers provide a better experience across physical and digital storefronts.

He said Adobe Sensei, the company’s artificial and machine-learning technology, supports the new features, including personalization -- "not transactional data, but bringing in data from outside the website" such as location offline transaction data when available, Klein said.   

The new features include the ability to dig into new insights and anomalies in the data not previously recognized through a product called Virtual Analyst. They also provide ways to achieve better conversions from mobile, optimization of ads and easy design, and to leverage photo-based product search and videos through a tagging system that Klein said will become available in the spring.

These tools -- which Adobe announced at NRF 2019 -- also can customize product recommendations, easily add lists to emails, and connect data and act on it in real-time.