The Dollar Shave Club recently tested changes to its mobile and desktop site to improve conversion rates and saw a 126 percent increase in conversions on the Samsung Galaxy S3 as well as a 27 percent increase in conversions on the Nexus 7.

The Dollar Shave Club ran A/B testing against versions from both Amazon CloudFront and Instart Logic, and the version from Instart Logic yielded these higher conversion rates by speeding up load time. The Instart Logic version also yielded a 16.8 percent overall increase in conversion across desktop and mobile.

“The way normally things work with a Web site is the Web browser downloads the code that makes up the page,” said Peter Blum, vice president of product management at Instart Logic, Mountain View, CA. “It reads through it and makes a shopping list of all the things it needs, the product images, the styling of the fonts, then it downloads that and finally it can display something for the user. So browsers need to download a fair amount of information before the user can see anything.

“We can get the screen to show early and let people interact and take the next action faster than the full download approach,” he said. “When you used to have to download videos, you’d click a link it would download the whole video. Now you can start watching while it’s downloading.

“That’s essentially how our service works. We’ll get the initial screen up and in the background download all the information that’s needed.”

The Dollar Shave Club is based in Venice, CA, and is an online razor retailer.

Conversion boost
The Dollar Shave Club decided to run A/B testing to improve its site’s conversion across both desktop and mobile.

The retailer worked with Instart Logic to improve the site by increasing the Web site delivery and decreasing wait time by between 20-80 percent depending on the page.

By reducing the time it takes to load pages on a Web site, the Dollar Shave Club was able to ensure stronger and longer engagement from consumers.

The Web application streaming technology lets users begin experiencing a Web application or site after only a portion of it has been downloaded.

It divides the application and its components into small fragments and sends the most important portions first. The remaining portions are downloaded in the background while a user is already interacting with the site.

Additionally, the Instart Logic technology lets marketers deliver richer experiences with higher-resolution images without increasing load time.

The Dollar Shave Club tested Instart Logic’s technology against Amazon CloudFront for 3.5 weeks, measuring hundreds of thousands of visits to the site. The Instart Logic version yielded a 16.8 percent increase in conversions.

Mobile experience
One of the Dollar Shave Club’ main goals in the site testing was to improve the mobile experience specifically.

Thirty-five to 45 percent of the Dollar Shave Club’s traffic comes from mobile, so the company wanted to create an optimal experience for those customers.

After the A/B testing the Dollar Shave Club has decided to move all of its traffic to Instart Logic’s technology.

“We originally built [the system] all around mobile,” Mr. Blum said. “We built it mobile-first.

“A lot of what we were trying to do is solve for issues that were popping up because of wireless issues,” he said. “There’s less bandwidth, a lot more congestion because there’s a lot of users using that same network, so we focused there on serving the wireless mobile problem. It happens to scale for desktops as well.”

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York