Living Spaces Chooses Zycada to Accelerate Dynamic Content and Boost Revenue
Today, Living Spaces boasts impressive web capabilities and a fully staffed eCommerce team. Livingspaces.com, their homepage, ranks in Alexa’s top 20k for global Internet engagement. eCommerce is a rapidly growing portion of the company’s revenue.
Challenge
Delivering Dynamic Content Quickly to Drive Revenue
Living Spaces relies heavily on rich, dynamic content to bring their products to life. In order to successfully sell furniture and home décor online, the company has to create an immersive eCommerce experience that makes customers feel as if they’re viewing items in person on the showroom floor. Living Spaces delivers this experience with detailed, high-resolution photos of all their products, including 360° images that allow customers to view an item from every angle.
This highly dynamic, interactive content uses more computing resources than simple static content, adding latency that slows Living Spaces’ web and mobile experience. The company understands that speed is critical to eCommerce, with faster page load and time to interactive (TTI) metrics driving better conversion rates and greater overall revenue. Living Spaces realized that to provide quicker eCommerce speeds, they would have to accelerate their dynamic content.
In addition, Living Spaces also noticed that when customers visited their web and mobile properties, their transactions were occasionally impeded by last mile issues. Last mile problems occur when a network experiences sudden, unexpected packet losses. These issues commonly impact wireless networks, including home Wi-Fi networks, and occur even more frequently on cellular networks.
“As head of eCommerce at Living Spaces, I’m constantly seeking new technologies to give our business the edge. My technical team is obsessed with reducing latency to enhance customer experience. We immediately recognized the opportunity with Zycada. Using Zycada, we achieved a sizable jump in revenue across our website.”
- Pete Franco
Vice President of eCommerce at Living Spaces Furniture
Solution
SOLUTION: ZYCADA YIELDS A MAJOR REVENUE BOOST
Pete Franco, VP of eCommerce at Living Spaces, always keeps his eyes open for innovative new technology that can advance the company’s core business objectives. "As head of eCommerce at Living Spaces, I’m constantly seeking new technologies to enhance customer experience," he said. Franco’s education in mechanical engineering, coupled with years of eCommerce experience, gave him the perspective to rigorously evaluate solutions for improving Living Spaces’ online shopping experience. Eventually, he discovered Zycada and decided to set up a free trial.
During a month-long proof of concept with Zycada, Franco quickly saw significant performance improvements. "We immediately recognized the opportunity with reducing latency to enhance customer experience," said Franco.
Benefits
Zycada’s bot technology rapidly accelerated Living Spaces’ dynamic content. Using machine learning, Zycada Cloud Service Accelerator first observed user activity to understand precisely how Living Spaces’ online customers behaved. For example, CSA learned that if a user views a certain couch, they’re then likely to view a specific rug. CSA then works ahead of users to pre-load content – such as high-resolution images – and other page elements before the actual customer has to. This significantly reduced latency, catapulting Living Spaces’ overall website and mobile app speeds. Ultimately, Zycada drove average page load time to under 50 milliseconds for one quarter of the company’s online shoppers.
Zycada also helped Living Spaces solve their last mile problems. By boosting Living Spaces network bandwidth and throughput, Zycada mitigated the impact of sudden packet drops that inevitably occur in customers’ wireless networks. This has dramatically improved the eCommerce experience, with customers far less likely to encounter errors or page crashes during key moments in their transactions. Living Spaces’ mobile app has particularly benefitted, as last mile problems occur most often in cellular networks.
With faster eCommerce speeds and fewer last mile challenges, Living Spaces saw major boosts to its online business.
For years, Living Spaces has excelled online and delivered one of the furniture sector’s best eCommerce platforms. Their experience shows that even major retailers who are already succeeding in eCommerce can still significantly improve their business results with Zycada.