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Web content—in the form of videos and articles—is crucial for Pegasus Lighting, a retailer and wholesaler of lighting products, says Chris Johnson, president and CEO. He credits blog posts, videos and high-resolution imagery with increasing by nearly a third the number of unique monthly visitors to the company’s e-commerce site, PegasusLighting.com.
The Beaver Falls, Penn.-based company began selling online in 1999, and projects its 2015 total revenue will reach $4 million in 2015, up about 15% from $3.4 million in 2014. 70% of its orders are processed through the shopping cart on PegasusLighting.com, the rest through its customer contact center via phone or live chat. Business customers like electricians, contractors and Nordstrom Inc. comprise half its client base, with consumers accounting for the other half.
Pegasus relies primarily on online marketing to grow sales, with a successful Internet search marketing effort through pay-per-click ads driving traffic to the e-commerce site. Content the company publishes in blogs also bolsters the traffic it receives from organic search, Johnson says.
“I don’t do traditional business-to-business advertising,” he says. “I don’t have a sales staff that does cold calling for us. I don’t advertise in magazines. People are truly finding us through a Google search.”
In 2009, Pegasus began blogging about light fixtures in a blog titled “Light Reading.” After four years of writing, it posted more than 300 blogs on its site about such topics as “How to Light a Museum.” 38,000 unique visitors visited the blog every month, Johnson says. “Traffic was growing really well on the blog, which was great, but I wasn’t monetizing a lot of that traffic because it was on a separate site,” Johnson says.
Johnson realized he needed to operate a single web site for e-commerce and his blogs, so that blog visitors would be more likely to become online buyers. In addition, he figured a new site could be designed with built-in technology for such applications as order management, product reviews and providing customers with shipping rates based on their order and shipping destination. And with 25% of his online customers arriving through mobile devices, he also wanted to deploy a site built with responsive design, which adapts the layout of an e-commerce site to the size of a shopper’s screen, including smartphones and tablets as well as PCs.
Johnson also wanted to add more products to PegasusLighting.com. “I started thinking about our growth as an online-only business, and I decided we needed more product selection,” he says. “We needed to spend less time managing existing product information and more time on new product information.”
Making all of those upgrades to his website would have required too much time and development cost, he says.
After reviewing about 10 e-commerce platform technology providers, Pegasus chose to deploy Aptos Digital Commerce Suite from Aptos Inc. Aptos developers began building the site in January 2015, and the new PegasusLighting.com launched in October. “Aptos really checked off a lot of boxes,” Johnson says. “It allowed me to have an all-encompassing e-commerce platform that had the main core feature sets that I needed embedded within the platform so I didn’t have to go outside with cost and maintenance.” He declines to comment on the cost of deploying Aptos.
Johnson didn’t need to seek outside vendors for an upgraded search function, question-and-answer section and product reviews and other technology upgrades, he adds. And his team also doesn’t need to manually create a new product description every time they now add items to Pegasus Lighting’s 4,000 available SKUs because the new system saves certain vital information, based on an item’s brand or intended use, that can be re-used for descriptions, he says. That has made his team three to four times faster at adding new product information, he adds.
In addition, the new site allowed Pegasus to migrate its 50 most popular blog posts onto a new “Learning Center” section, which features articles on projects, design tips and buying guides. Thanks largely to those blog posts and the company’s mobile traffic, PegasusLighing.com now receives 200,000 visitors monthly, up 30% from 140,000 prior to the relaunch, Johnson says.
Johnson credits the popular blog posts, as well as a site built for mobile, for driving the additional traffic.
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