Aptimize

BuyOnlineNow

What they needed

BuyOnlineNow knew that their website was working well – after all, their business has been growing quickly for much of the last decade.  But that growth had also increased the depth and complexity of the site, and load times were suffering.  

Keith Robinson, IT Project Manager at BuyOnlineNow, noticed several areas where the site’s performance was affecting sales: “Slow load times were limiting the amount of time that customers were willing to spend on the site, which can have negative effects on average order value, number of products ordered, and overall revenue.  But it wasn’t just a matter of sales to us, we knew that our customers deserved the best possible experience when they came to our site, and we had to find a way to make it faster for them.”

The company quickly identified that load times were limiting their ability to scale the site and grow their business with existing and new customers.  Furthermore – Google had recently updated their algorithms to incorporate speed and load times as a factor in your page rank.  If they didn’t do something to accelerate their site, there was risk that they would miss out on opportunities for sales to existing customer, and lose some of their organic traffic.  

The Aptimize Solution

After researching some of the available solutions, Keith determined that there were only two options: to manually optimize the site for performance, or to implement website acceleration software.  Ultimately BuyOnlineNow chose to buy licenses for Aptimize Website Accelerator.  

The installation and setup took only 20 minutes, and BuyOnlineNow didn’t have to make a single code change to their website.  Even more importantly, the team at BuyOnlineNow knew that WAX would scale with their site, so they wouldn’t have to invest excessive man hours hand-optimizing the site page-by-page in the future.

Benefits

After installation, BuyOnlineNow immediately began to see performance improvements across the board.  Load times improved 69%, the start render load time improved 76%, and site search speed improved 23%.  Aptimize had dramatically improved the sites performance in under 30 minutes. But the best results came in the days and weeks that followed.  Visitors’ time-on-site increased 4.43%, page views increased 8.26%, and the bounce rate was reduced 13.4%.  

Top-line revenue also increased due to the site acceleration.  BuyOnlineNow’s conversion rate increased 1.41%, average order value increased 8.39%, and total products purchase increased 9.55%.  All of these factors led to a 3.33% total revenue increase from sales on the site. 

Results:

Site Improvements:

• Load Time: 69% improvement
• Start Render: 76%  improvement 
• Time on Site: 4.43% improvement
• Page Views: 8.26% improvement
• Bounce Rate: 13.4% improvement
• Site Search Speed: 23%   improvement

Sales Improvements:            

• Conversion Rate: 1.41% improvement
• Average Order Value: 8.39% improvement
• Purchased Products: 9.55% improvement
• Transactions: 8.01% improvement
• Revenue Increase: 3.33% improvement

Cost Savings and Value:

• Install Time: 20 Minutes
• Bandwidth: 26% saved
• Hardware Cost Saving Year 1: $6,300

Installing Aptimize improved top-line revenue and the customer experience for BuyOnlineNow.  It also helped reduce the costs of doing business. BuyOnlineNow is now saving over $6,000 dollars each year in hardware costs, and is saving 26% of the bandwidth they were previously using.  But perhaps the best value was that Aptimize paid for itself in just 6 weeks.  

Today, BuyOnlineNow has a fast, stable, reliable site that keeps them ahead in a competitive office supplies industry and provides the best customer experience in the business.  “We’re thrilled with the results we’ve seen from Aptimize,” said Bob Herman, CEO of BuyOnlineNow.  “We got more than just a faster website, we are now better able to service our customers, drive more sales, cut costs and continue to grow our business.”