Native vs PWA: How MarketLink Chose Performance Over Reach and Won Conversions

Tech · 6 min read

MarketLink, a marketplace connecting local pros with homeowners, faced rising drop-off in conversion funnels on mobile web. The product team framed the decision around three criteria: conversion rate, frequency of use, and engineering velocity. After running customer interviews, they learned that active buyers expected speedy, offline-capable experiences and trusted native app cues like push notifications and smoother payments.

The team prototyped a lean native checkout experience implemented with React Native while keeping the PWA for discovery. They ran an A/B experiment where returning users were routed either to the PWA or invited to try the native flow for checkout. Results favored the native experience: a 22% lift in completed bookings and a 40% reduction in payment failures due to better integration with platform payment APIs.

MarketLink documented tradeoffs — longer initial build time and separate QA cycles — and mitigated them with shared component libraries and CI pipelines. The outcome demonstrates how startups should weigh conversion-critical flows and user expectations against reach: when revenue per transaction is high, native performance can justify the extra cost.