With its online traffic increasing tenfold from June to October 2016, Costume SuperCenter had a tremendous challenge on its hands as it prepared for the all-important Halloween season. The costume retailer had to adopt a mobile-first mentality, which meant creating a responsively designed e-Commerce site experience.
Five months after launching its new e-Commerce and mobile presences via the WebLinc unified commerce platform in May 2016, Costume SuperCenter has seen:
Using WebLinc’s services, Costume SuperCenter also revamped its sister brand, party supplies retailer Birthday In A Box. The online retailer needed to ensure that both brands’ mobile presence was consistent with their e-Commerce sites.
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Prior to working with WebLinc, Birthday In A Box’s mobile presence was simply its original e-Commerce site, delivered to users’ mobile devices. But since the shift to a mobile-specific presentation, Birthday In A Box has seen:
Reaping The Benefits Of Responsive Design
Unlike Birthday In A Box, Costume SuperCenter had previously maintained a dedicated mobile site for its costumes segment,separate from its desktop site.
“Everything on the costume site was the same — pricing, product — but we literally had to treat it as a separate site,” said Jim Moore, VP of Marketing for Costume SuperCenter. “It meant we had to build the promos on the mobile site as well as the desktop site. We had to update the banners on the site, and it was a royal pain from an administrative standpoint. It seemed like the best approach at the time, but we’ve found that the best approach is to do responsive design.”
Moore noted that skyrocketing mobile traffic over the past few years convinced the company to reach out to WebLinc and adopt that mobile-first mindset. With the WebLinc partnership, the brand no longer had to worry about its internal IT and development teams designing the sites. Instead the retailer could defer any web-related issues to the WebLinc UX department, which shared tips and examples from other recently developed e-Commerce experiences as a blueprint for what ideas could work.
“You want to have a consistent user experience, whether there’s five people on your site, 5,000 people or 50,000 people at any one time,” Moore said. “Working with WebLinc, we were able to easily scale the SaaS platform during our Halloween season without having to take any site down, restart servers, and all those steps that can happen when you’re adding infrastructure.”
Optimizing On-Site Search
WebLinc also assisted Costume SuperCenter by optimizing its on-site search. The on-site search bar is a major factor in customer engagement, with search bar users converting at a higher rate than non-users. With the WebLinc platform, the retailer built its search engine to focus on its best-selling merchandise.
“When we first went live, the search results were not great because we didn’t have historical sales data in WebLinc’s database,” Moore said. “Obviously, search is built around relevance and that’s important, but you also want to have search built around products that sell. The search results were actually worse than before for those first six to eight weeks, but the more we used the system and had more traffic run through the site, it got better — to the point where it started to outperform the old site in terms of on-site search conversion rates, and it continues to do so.”
