BY PAUL DEMERY Managing Editor, B2B E-commerce
With a redesigned web site that offers more products, better navigation and improved analytics, Littman Bros. has nearly doubled visitor-to-sales conversion rates and expects strong growth in online sales, owner Benson Littman says.
With a redesigned web site that offers more products, better navigation and improved analytics, lighting products retailer Littman Bros. has nearly doubled visitor-to-sales conversion rates, owner Benson Littman tells InternetRetailer.com.
Littman Bros., which operates a single store in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, IL, in addition to LittmanBros.com, launched the redesigned site last month on the idev e-commerce platform from AmericanEagle.com. The new platform replaces a platform developed in-house that could not support growth, Littman says.
“When we were on the in-house system, we couldn’t grow the site,” he says. “We couldn’t do reports on customer activity or easily load new products.”
But by adding products and improving navigation, analytics and marketing, Littman Bros. has experienced a sharp rise in the percentage of visitors that complete a purchase, Littman says. “We practically doubled our conversion rates in the first four weeks, and we’re just getting our feet wet,” he says.
The idev platform, which is hosted by Park Ridge, IL-based AmericanEagle.com (no relation to retailer American Eagle Outfitters), supports Littman’s plan to add tens of thousands of products, Littman says. “We’re already at 15,000 on the new platform, up from about 5,000, and we expect to add about 100,000 products over the next two years.”
The idev platform also has improved site navigation by allowing visitors to shop by lighting type, then by variants such as color, brand/collection, style and price. Product pages also offer more comprehensive product descriptions and larger, more numerous images. The idev platform uses Ajax web site development technology, which enables images and content to appear instantly without having to wait for entire pages to load.
Littman Bros. is also improving marketing efforts by providing better analytics data on visitor clickstream and buying behavior to LocalLaunch Inc., the retailer’s Chicago-based marketing partner that handles search and other forms of marketing, Littman says.
Although Littman Bros. is a privately held company and does not release sales figures, Littman says he expects the improved web site to equal the annual sales of the company’s 10,000-square-foot store within a year, then double that amount over each of the next two years.
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