OfficeSupply.com, a distributor of office supplies ranging from paper shredders to furniture, is addressing surging mobile-commerce sales by rebuilding its site using responsive design, which adapts the layout of an e-commerce site to the size of a shopper’s screen, says Joe Schaefer, vice president of sales and marketing.
The relaunch with responsive design, scheduled for 2016, will make it easier for customers to research and place orders on mobile devices, enabling OfficeSupply.com to better take advantage of customers’ increasing preference for mobile shopping, Schaefer says. Over the past year, the company’s mobile sales have increased 200%, ten times faster than the overall 20% growth in online sales, Schaefer says. For Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 26, through Nov. 29, its mobile sales increased 176% year over year, he adds. He declines to further specify holiday weekend results.
And Schaefer expects mobile sales to continue increasing at a rapid pace. “I believe there will be greater demand for mobile in the B2B segment,” he says. “It’s already moving in that direction for us revenue-wise.” OfficeSupply is No. 170 in the new B2B E-Commerce 300, but doesn’t break out its mobile sales.
OfficeSupply’s team of in-house developers began formatting the company’s e-commerce site using responsive design in July. OfficeSupply.com currently serves mobile customers with separate websites for smartphones and tablets. Many companies are moving to responsive design so they can operate a single e-commerce site that serves all devices, rather than having to update desktop and mobile sites separately when they add a product, change a price or introduce a promotion. The single site also tends to show up higher in search engine results.
When shoppers using a smartphone or tablet computer visit OfficeSupply.com today, they are redirected to the site that fits their device. “The challenge is trying to predict what screen sizes will pop up in the future,” Schaefer says, adding: “We’re now working on transitioning from a mobile-optimized site to responsive design, so our system will automatically recognize the customer’s screen size and format to that screen size without having to make any specific future adjustments.”
About 10% of OfficeSupply.com’s visitors come from a mobile device, he says. That likely amounts to about 34,000 monthly website visitors arriving from a mobile device, as OfficeSupply.com attracts 340,000 total monthly unique visitors according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb.
OfficeSupply does about 60% of its business, or about $25 million, in sales to businesses, schools and government agencies—which together constitute its B2B category. Although OfficeSupply considers the other 40% retail sales, many of those sales are to customers who operate one- or two-person businesses, Schaefer says.
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