Google Vietnam held the first ever “Mobile Hackathon Vietnam” on September 6 and 7, a training event for more than 25 local businesses in a range of sectors, from e-commerce and travel to publications, to help Vietnamese businesses adopt the latest mobile web technologies and grow their businesses on the mobile platform.

Web penetration in Vietnam is on the rise. It currently stands at 60 per cent, up from 48 per cent in 2014. 

The main force driving the trend is mobile, and right now there are more mobile connections than people in Vietnam, at 128.3 million for 90 million people, with a smartphone penetration rate of 48 per cent and rising.

As the next generation of mobile-only internet users come online, mobile is going to make the web more local, which is going to benefit the millions of very local small businesses as people turn to their mobiles to find the perfect wedding venue, the local cafe, or the best place to fix a flat tire.

Importance of a great mobile experience

Mobile has raised consumer expectations regarding speed and relevance. If users do not get a good experience and if the site is slow to load or hard to read, they will head elsewhere. 

In fact, 53 per cent of consumers will abandon a mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, according to a recent Google survey. Not having a mobile-optimized site is like shutting the shop’s front door to customers.

Two products from Google can help webmasters offer a great experience on mobile. Progressive Web Applications (PWA) take advantage of new technologies to bring the best of mobile sites and native applications to users. 

Put simply, it’s a lightweight mobile website that offers users, especially in smaller towns and cities, an app-like experience on simple smartphones, requiring a fraction of the data used by native apps. 

It has the reach of the web but offers a native app-like immersive customer experience.

Secondly, the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project provides a new standard, built on top of existing web technologies, to enable blazingly-fast page rendering and content delivery.

Vietnamese businesses already showing what good looks like

Some Vietnamese businesses are already offering a great experience to their users. Tiki, one of Vietnam fastest-growing retail companies, knows how important it is to offer consumers a great experience on mobile.

Businesses that will seize the benefits of this new mobile world are those that act fast to give a great user experience on smartphones using technologies like PWA and AMP. 

Since the launch of PWA on Tiki.vn, the site speed is six times faster, the user revisit rate has increased 28 per cent, and the true conversation rate on the mobile web has doubled compared to the pre-PWA launch.

“The decision to adopt the PWA technology was a rather risky but necessary decision for Tiki’s development at the moment,” said Mr. Le The Hien, Product Development Manager at Tiki.vn. 

“This option helps Tiki improve the speed of its mobile version several times, thus unlocking the development of important features while helping Tiki’s system become scalable on a large scale to meet the speed and strong growth of e-commerce in Vietnam. PWA is one of the key factors allowing Tiki to extend its coverage to a wide range of customers around the country.”

VN Economic Times