Content tech tools drive up DiscountGolfWorld.com conversions 210%
1st in Video – Music World Inc.’s product lines were rapidly growing on its two e-commerce sites in 2006, but the company wasn’t able to display multiple products on one web page. At the same time, West Coast shoppers often were unable to load a home-page image.
Lacking the resources to fix the delivery problem internally, the e-retailer contracted with Akamai Technologies Inc. last fall to handle the bulk of content delivery for its two e-commerce web sites, says Justin Meats, information technology director at 1st in Video.
1st in Video’s Your Electronic Warehouse, which operates the e-commerce site 4ElectronicWarehouse.com, is No. 435 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. The web site carries consumer electronics, while 1st in Video’s DiscountGolfWorld.com sells apparel and equipment.
The latter site displays hundreds of golf products, many tied to other sports, such as ball markers that carry the logo of the player’s favorite major league baseball team. In October 2006 1st in Video turned over server content delivery to Akamai and since then the provider’s server farms have shouldered the page response task.
Around the same time, the company developed a JavaScript rich media product viewer in-house. “We needed a tool to display multiple pictures and a style selector below them.” Meats says. The company chose Ajax over Flash technology.
“We decided against using Flash because it requires an additional plug-in and felt Ajax was more flexible, more cross-platform compliant. Ajax also doesn’t require any additional software to program. We would have had to purchase additional software if we went with Flash,” Meats says.
Ajax is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a technology that enables web pages to be more interactive and change or increase images quickly by mousing over them.
Results have been impressive, Meats says. For starters, Akamai now “handles 84% of the hits to our web server,” he says. As of last month, DiscountGolfWorld.com showed a whopping 210% increase in conversions, while 4ElectronicWarehouse.com recorded a 42% increase. Meats attributes the higher conversions on the golf site to the broader range of product customization options and faster content delivery.
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