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The decision on the table is which of those capabilities your storefront needs and who owns them. "We want a PWA" is a common brief. It hides choices about what to cache, when to ask a shopper to install, and how fresh prices and stock must be. Those choices decide whether the result feels quick and trustworthy or quick and wrong.
Three building blocks turn a website into a PWA
A progressive web app (PWA) rests on three technical parts. A service worker is a small script that sits between the browser and the network and decides what to load from a local cache. A web app manifest is a file that tells the phone the name, icon and colours to use when the site is installed. HTTPS is required for both.
None of this needs an app store. The shopper opens a link, the browser picks up the manifest and can offer to add the store to the home screen. From there it opens full screen, without the browser bar. Whether that experience is enough, or whether a native app still earns its place, is the subject of choosing between PWA and native.
What a progressive web app changes for shoppers
The first gain is speed on the second visit. The service worker keeps the storefront's layout, scripts and images on the device, so category and product pages appear before the network has answered. On mobile, where a large share of retail traffic arrives, that difference is felt on every tap. Mobile speed is also one of the main arguments for headless commerce with the Composable Storefront.
The second gain is resilience. A shopper on a train or in a store basement can keep browsing pages already cached, and the basket survives a dropped connection. Push notifications and home screen installation come on top, but they depend on the shopper opting in. On iPhone, web push works only after the site has been added to the home screen.
How Salesforce storefronts deliver PWA capabilities
On Salesforce B2C Commerce, the Salesforce PWA Kit (Composable Storefront) is the toolkit for building a headless storefront as a PWA. It is a React-based front end that talks to the commerce engine through APIs and runs on Managed Runtime, the Salesforce hosting layer. What that toolkit contains, and how it fits alongside Managed Runtime, is covered in the Composable Storefront and Managed Runtime.
We built Fast FORWARD, our own pre-built headless storefront, on the Composable Storefront. It ships with the PWA groundwork in place, which lets a brand go live in weeks instead of months and spend its budget on the parts shoppers notice.
