Imagine settling in for a relaxing evening with the current bestseller you’re in the thick of only to open the tome and find that every space, period, line break and paragraph break had been removed. The squeezed text would be pretty tough to decipher and understand by a human. The book, however, would shed some pages.
That is the concept behind a web and mobile coding technique called minifying, says Josh Pennington, a programmer for Working Persons Enterprises Inc., a retailer of work clothing and boots such as overalls, coveralls and steel toe boots. It’s a trick the retailer uses to speed its mobile page load time.
When a programmer writes JavaScript or Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) code, he writes in a clean way with spaces and breaks so it is easy to review and understand. Once it is deemed good to go Working Person removes all unnecessary characters, breaks and spaces from source code without affecting functionality; this reduces the size of a file and thus shaves off time from the total page load time. This extra step, Pennington says, condenses the file, making it smaller and quicker to download.
“It can cut the file size down by 20% to 25%,” Pennington says. “It doesn’t cut the page load time by that percentage but it helps and impacts the download speed of that portion of the page.”
It’s savvy thinking and tactics like these that help smaller retailers like WorkingPerson.com, No. 379 in the 2015 Mobile 500, grow mobile sales and compete with the big guys in mobile site performance. The trick typically takes less than an hour for the two employees who maintain the retailer’s web and mobile website to complete, Pennington says. And it is paying off, the retailer is projecting 43% mobile sales growth for 2015, estimating mobile sales to grow from $3.5 million in 2014 to nearly $5 million.
Today 10% of web sales stem from mobile devices at the retailer, says Eric Deniger, president at Working Person.
The retailer operates what is commonly known as a dynamic serving site, which is a hybrid approach between a responsive design site and a stand-alone mobile website. For a website that uses dynamic serving, the URL the consumer sees is the same on a mobile site and desktop, but the server detects that a consumer is on a mobile device and displays content different from what is displayed on a computer, and pulled from a separate code base.
Working Person says small mobile changes can have a big impact. And so it refreshes its mobile site once a year, completing what Deniger coins as not a complete overhaul but rather some cosmetic surgery. Last year that included tweaking the mobile checkout by replacing the previous process that required four to five steps with mobile checkout that’s completed on a single page. It also integrated with Google Maps to auto-suggest an address as the shopper begins typing based on where she is by tapping into a smartphone’s GPS functionality. It also auto-populates a returning shopper’s address based on what he has entered before.
The retailer is now in the midst of its annual mobile nips and tucks. On the docket this year is changing product pages to include larger images that it hopes will make the pages easier to navigate and check out from. “We don’t want them to hit the quantity option instead of Add To Cart because that means three more taps before you can actually add to cart,” Pennington says. While the larger images might slow load times slightly the retailer thinks it’s important for the customer to clearly see products. It’s also adding auto-complete functionality to search queries based on what mobile visitors have searched for in the past.
WorkingPerson.com says more than 20% of mobile revenue stems from e-mail, which it optimizes for smartphones. The retailer, which sells both to businesses and individual consumers, uses vendor Windsor Circle to help it segment the some 60 million e-mails it sends annually into various campaigns based on past purchases and other customer data. The retailer, which has 600,000 e-mail subscribers, for example, sends different e-mails to purchasing agents buying for a government entity than it does to a shopper who purchased a single pair of steel-toe boots a few months ago. It also hosts an annual 12 Days of Christmas e-mail campaign with an e-mail deal each day for 12 days over the holidays that generates what Deniger says is a significant spike in mobile sales from smartphones.
One thing WorkingPerson.com isn’t so sure will bring a spike to mobile sales is much buzzed-about Google Buy button, which the search engine giant calls Purchase with Google. “It’s neat,” Deniger says. “But its success really depends on if consumers are willing to buy from the search results page. Facebook has been trying to get you to buy in its ecosystem for years but it hasn’t taken off.”
Google, which charges for each click on its Buy button, is far from the only platform rolling out a Buy button. Nearly every social network including Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have introduced or tested Buy buttons or related initiatives over the past year. But Google’s effort may be different because a consumer researching a product on a search engine may well intend to buy that time. That’s quite different from such social networks as Pinterest or Instagram, which serve as forums for users to gather items they aspire to buy—and where they’re also interested in engaging with friends.
Still other retailers are willing to test anything that will make buying on a smartphone easier. Chris Johnson, president and CEO of Pegasus Lighting falls into that camp. Johnson, who uses ChannelAdvisor Corp., an e-commerce services provider that helps merchants sell through such online portals as those run by Amazon and eBay Inc. as well as through Purchases on Google, says he met with the vendor last week to discuss the new Google option.
Pegasus which did $450,000 in mobile sales in 2014 says mobile accounts for 15% of total e-commerce sales. 2014 mobile sales grew more than 100% year over year, Johnson says.
“I basically said I will try anything that will help facilitate sales, so yes, I’m willing to try it,” Johnson says. But Johnson wants to know more about whether or not the program will enable him to foster a relationship with his customer as if she were buying thought his mobile or desktop site. That includes wanting to know if he gets access to customer data, such as the consumer’s email address. For its part Google has said retailers can offer consumers the option to receive marketing and promotional messages.
Follow mobile business journalist Katie Evans, editor, at Mobile Strategies 360, @Mobile360Katie
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