Case study: LuckyVitamin.com uses FEO to deliver "5-star service" to online customers

22 October 2012  -   Tags:

Contributed by Tammy Everts.

"Customers want everything faster," says LuckyVitamin.com president Sam Wolf. "If you can offer it to them, they're going to stick around and spend more."

As a pioneer in the online distribution of health and wellness products, LuckyVitamin.com has put exceptional customer service at the core of its business. Fast page load times are critical to delivering on this commitment. 

Wolf sees faster pages as the digital equivalent of speedy customer service offered in traditional brick-and-mortar outlets. "We've known for a long time that faster pages equal more revenue for our business," he says.

LuckyVitamin.com has a stated goal of "making the time between your final click and the arrival of your package seem like seconds." To achieve this goal, the company's fulfillment team is staffed around the clock 7 days a week, and representatives are always available to offer support.

In the early days, LuckyVitamin.com's developers devoted countless hours to manually optimizing pages for faster performance. But like many companies, they found hand coding to be an arduous task that required the time of their top coders. They began to investigate automated solutions.  

The company was well aware of the challenges in optimizing a complex ecommerce website. The site has rich content for its entire inventory, and utilizes sophisticated merchandising and directed product search facilities. 

After a trial of Strangeloop’s cloud-based Site Optimizer service, the decision was a "no-brainer" for Wolf:

"We liked the Strangeloop implementation process, and it demonstrated results right away. We're not an Amazon or a Facebook, who have entire elite teams of developers who specialize in front-end optimization. But with Strangeloop, we could get the same advanced expertise and insight that Amazon and Facebook have, via a product."

Key benefits:

  1. The company has eliminated enough network overhead to offset the Site Optimizer subscription cost.
  2. Developer productivity has improved by 10%.
  3. Instead of performance tuning, top developers can now focus on feature development.

Talk to a performance expert

Interested in discussing what faster pages could do for your company? Talk to a performance expert.
LuckyVitamin.com use FEO to deliver ‘5-star service’ to online customers
“Customers want everything faster,” says LuckyVitamin.com president Sam Wolf. “If you can offer it to them, they’re going to stick around and spend more.” 
A pioneer in the online distribution of health and wellness products, exceptional customer service has been at the core of LuckyVitamin.com’s strategy since its inception in 2004. Page speed is a critical component in delivering on this commitment. 
Wolf sees fast pages as the digital equivalent of speedy customer service offered in traditional brick-and-mortar outlets. “We’ve known for a long time that faster pages equal more revenue for our business,” he says.
LuckyVitamin.com has a stated goal of “making the time between your final click and the arrival of your package seem like seconds.” To achieve this goal, their fulfillment team works around the clock 7 days a week, and representatives are always available to offer support.
In the early days, staff devoted untold hours to manually optimizing pages. But like most who try it, they found hand coding to be an arduous task requiring the time of their top developers, and began seeking automated solutions.  
The company was well aware of the challenges in optimizing a complex ecommerce website. The site has rich content for its entire inventory, and utilizes sophisticated merchandising and directed product search facilities. 
After a trial of Strangeloop’s cloud-based Site Optimizer service, however, the decision was a “no-brainer” for Wolf: “We liked the Strangeloop implementation process, and it demonstrated results right away.”
And what results
Eliminating network overhead
“Being able to optimize via the cloud is incredible. We’ve eliminated a huge potential network overhead. This alone makes Site Optimizer pay for itself right out of the gate.”
Improved employee productivity
“We’ve seen about a 10% increase in employee productivity. Now that performance tuning is no longer part of our developers’ workload, they can get back to concentrating on feature development.”