Fast Growth and Fast Sites Go Hand-In-Hand
US Markerboard
Founded by CEO Scott Newman over ten years ago, the company has experienced sustained, rapid growth over the past decade. Today the company offers the largest selection of whiteboards and communication boards in the business, and has expanded into other facility furnishings such as floor and entrance mats.
US Markerboard’s growth has been driven by their early adoption of web-based sales, even with highly customizable products. They disrupted the whiteboard and chalkboard business at their inception when the vast majority of the market was limited to local vendors with extremely narrow product selections. USMarkerboard.com gave customers a place to explore a much larger selection of the most innovative and reliable products in the business, and they could order any of those unique or custom products with the click of a mouse.
What they needed
Optimizing our site's performance, improves a lot of key business metrics, including increasing average order value and reducing cost per order.
US Markerboard knew that their website was of the upmost importance to their business – but it was taking 9 seconds on average to load a page on their site. As the company had grown, so had the website’s size and complexity. Scott Newman, CEO at US Markerboard, noticed several areas where the site’s performance was affecting sales. “Our load times weren’t the worst in the world, but there was plenty of room for improvement. The way we looked at it – optimizing our site’s performance improves a lot of key business metrics, including increasing average order value and reducing cost per order for entering orders into the system. This made it a very easy business decision – we had to optimize our site’s performance.”
The company quickly identified that load times were limiting their ability to scale the site and grow their business with existing and new customers.
The Aptimize Solution
Scott and his IT team determined they should make several operational improvements to their site, and at the top of the list was to invest in and quickly implement website acceleration software. “Our team’s time is best spent adding core features that grow the business in our areas of expertise instead of optimizing performance – which is best left to the experts”.
After researching the available solutions US Markerboard implemented Aptimize Website Accelerator for Linux across 12 separate websites, including US Markerboard, US Entrance Mats and Briteinc.com. Leveraging Aptimize’s consulting services to make adjustments for peak performance, implementation was a success across each site
Benefits
What I can tell you is due to some significant changes, not the least of which was installing Aptimize, our sales grew over 15% in 2010. We met and are exceeding all of our monthly sales projections. This is amazing.
Upon installation, US Markerboard immediately began to see performance improvements across all the websites. First, and foremost - load times improved from 9 seconds down to 3 seconds. Page views increased by 27% and pages visited increased by 8%.
But some of the best results were directly related to sales: bounce rate was reduced 10%, and conversion rates increased by a whopping 25%.
The results didn’t stop there, however. Since installing Aptimize, the number of products ordered (per order) has increased by 65%, and the average order value increased by 15% - which is unheard of in ecommerce. As Newman said, “This is a huge number.”
Looking back at all of 2010 – Newman and his team are very pleased with the results:
At A Glance Results:
Site Improvements:
- Load Time Improvement: 6 seconds faster (from 9 seconds to 3 seconds with Aptimize)
- Page Views: 27% improvement
- Pages visited: 8% increase
- Bounce Rate: 10% improvement
Sales Improvements:
- Conversion Rate: 25% improvement
- Average Order Value: 15% improvement
- Purchased Products: 65% improvement
- Sales Increase: 15% growth in 2010
Today, US Markerboard’s site moves at a speed that better suits their business – lightning fast. Sales are up, and accelerating, the customer experience on-site is greatly improved, and the cost per order continues to decline rapidly.
- Download
- Customer Size:
- Undisclosed
- Located in:
- United States
- Customer Profile:
US Markerboard is an e-commerce website providing a wide range of whiteboards, chalkboards, bulletin boards and book carts for business and education.
Inc. 5000 recognizes US Markerboard as one fo the 'Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies in America' for four years consecutively.
Technology:
Linux / Apache
Website Address:
www.usmarkerboard.com