When Eric Houtkooper was ready to launch another e-commerce site, he picked the design format that had worked well for him in the past—responsive design.

Houtkooper is the president of dog supply e-retailer PupLife Inc., No. 490 the 2016 Internet Retailer Mobile 500. In May of 2015 Houtkopper launched RitaBean.com, which sells products for cat and dog lovers. After three successful years operating a responsive design site for PupLife.com, he knew he wanted RitaBean.com to use the same web design format. With responsive design, a single website adjusts to the size of the screen the visitor is viewing, and only requires that the retailer maintain one codebase and one set of web content.

When PupLife.com switched to responsive design in 2012, sales and conversion rates increased, especially on mobile devices. For example in the first year, PupLife.com’s smartphone conversion rate increased 111% to 0.19% from 0.09%.

“We saw how much mobile traffic was surging and we wanted to get ahead of the game,” Houtkopper says. “It was a big risk at the time and it did pay off and it paid off big time.”

Now, three years later, Houtkooper is still pleased with PupLife’s mobile sales gains,which he attributes to responsive design. PupLife’s smartphone conversion rate is .55% and for tablets 1.25%. Houtkooper is also predicting his mobile (smartphone plus tablet) sales to increase 8% year over year this year to $185,760 in 2015, from $172,000 in 2014.

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In those three years, Houtkooper has updated the look of PupLife.com to help with the site’s navigation and mobile performance.

PupLife uses e-commerce platform provider Shopify for its responsive site. It pays Shopify a monthly hosting fee of $200, Houtkooper says. PupLife uses Shopify’s pre-made design templates for its site that it can maintain in house and tweak to better fit the site. With responsive design, once Houtkooper makes a change to the site, that change shows up on any device a consumer is using, smartphone, tablet or computer.

PupLife recently changed from one Shopify responsive style template to another and decreased its smartphone load time to less than 3.5 seconds, which is a big improvement from the 14 seconds it took to load when it first launched its responsive site, Houtkooper says. With the theme change PupLife changed which elements it displayed, eliminating heaver items.

PupLife also improved its navigation to have filtering options on the category page so consumers can narrow their selections, which PupLife shoppers couldn’t do with the old template. For example, consumers can go to dog collars, then filter by material, color and price.

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So when PupLife was ready to launch a sister e-commerce site, responsive web design was an easy decision for the e-retailer, he says. It took Houtkopper about a year and half to develop the new site.

RitaBean.com’s new responsive site also uses a design template from Shopify and it loads on smartphones in 1.2 seconds, Houtkooper says.

Smartphones account for 37% of Rita Bean’s traffic, tablets 10% and desktops 53%, Houtkooper says. For sales, smartphones account for 21%, tablets 36% and desktop 43%.

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