BlackMilk Clothing has been selling unique pieces of apparel since 2009 and is known for its collaborations with brands such as Star Wars, Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda.
As the company grew in popularity so did its mobile purchases, this meant the e-commerce retailer needed a sturdy site to keep up with its mobile users.
Matthew Suddock is the head of IT at Black Milk Clothing and he tells Digital Nation how the company upgraded their platform to be more mobile native.
“We had 85 percent of our traffic coming through mobile. We also felt that we could take in our current solution as fast as it could go without major changes,” he said.
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“We weren’t going to get any more performance from the platform in terms of page load speed. But we were running into some hard limits in terms of the platform from numbers, customers online and the number of customers checking out at the same time.”
Since implementing the PWA solution from Balance Internet they’ve experienced an increase in page load times.
“We’ve knocked six seconds off our product page load time, we’ve knocked two seconds off our category load time. As you can imagine, when you’ve got lots of products on a category, and you’ve got to fill in all of the blanks on them, it takes a long time,” he said.
“There are various technological solutions for that but nothing really gets the customer over the line, like providing the whole page fully interactive as fast as possible.”
BlackMilk Clothing also wanted to create a consistent look and feel for its site, Suddock explained.
“Balance Internet redesigned every single one of our pages to improve the consistency to make the theme just work and make the product shine. We were quite happy with our base colour scheme as it was, but Balance helped us to show the product in its best light through the theme,” he said.
“As a result, we’ve got something like a 10 percent increase in transactions post-implementation. Our e-commerce manager said it best when he said he wants it to be fast, friendly and frictionless and that was our guiding light in the project.”
