Online shoppers expect web sites to load quickly, especially when they’re browsing on their smartphones and tablets.
To improve the online shopping experience for desktop and mobile visitors, Pure Romance partnered with Yottaa, an automated app optimization service provider. Since completing the implementation process in June 2014, the direct-selling party company specializing in relationship enhancement products has seen mobile load times drop by 44%. In addition, as site bounce rates dropped, the company saw conversions improve by 17%.
The majority of Pure Romance’s sales derive from private parties that women hold in their homes, which Dan Ashbridge, Director of e-Commerce for the company, describes as the “traditional Tupperware Party” model.
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“That is still the vast majority of our business,” said Ashbridge in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “With around 20,000 consultants around the world, this is our largest revenue source.”
Over the past year, though, Pure Romance began to shift attention to increasing its e-Commerce presence as a way to serve another portion of the target audience.
“There are always going to be customers who are interested in our brand and our products, but aren’t looking for the party experience,” Ashbridge said. “The e-Commerce experience also allows us to sell to men, since our parties are exclusively for women. Men actually make up about 25% of our online audience.”
In 2013, Pure Romance launched a new web site and implemented an “aggressive digital marketing strategy,” Ashbridge explained. This was something “very new for a traditional company used to spending ad dollars on TV and radio.”
However, as its e-Commerce business grew, Pure Romance was plagued with long load times, especially on the mobile site that was built using responsive design. With smartphones accounting for more than 50% of the company’s traffic, it was paramount that Pure Romance tackled the issue head on.
“Our CEO was pressing the website team to find ways to improve web performance, and Yottaa came along with the perfect solution to our problem,” Ashbridge said. “Since our site operates on responsive design, many of the large desktop site files and images were loading first, even though they weren’t necessary for displaying on the mobile web site. So potential customers were waiting too long for our site to load and many were choosing to simply bounce.”
Pure Romance is now partnering with Yottaa to further improve site performance, as well as test and refine the online shopping experience across all devices, Ashbridge reported. “Now that our internal development team has more free time on their schedules, we are looking forward to partnering with Yottaa to further improve our web site performance. I feel like Yottaa will be vital in our efforts to segment our traffic and provide the best shopping experience possible with our learnings from A/B and multivariate testing.”
