RS Components is an ecommerce retailer primarily serving the industrial sector. Working within the B2B space, the business took the decision to develop and optimise a mobile site to better serve customers working in the field, away from desktops – a tactic that’s paid off through improved user experience metrics and rising conversion rates.
Thanks to board level buy-in, RS Components’ mobile-first developments improve conversion rate by 29%.
About RS Components
B2B ecommerce retailer
Industrial electronics, and hardware, tools, and maintenance products
Headquarters in Corby, UK
Goals
Provide better user experience
Operate as a mobile-first company
Leverage mobile in growing market share
Approach
Gained board level sponsorship for mobile-first developments
Established focus on speed optimisations
Built AMP pages
Scoped PWA features for 2019 launch
Results
Launched 1.4 million AMP pages
Increased conversion rate by 29%
15% reduction in bounce rate
Improved site speed by 20%
RS Components originally established their mobile site in 2016. Even though the nature of RS Components’ business means that desktop dominates (desktop visit share is above 80% and average order value on desktop is about double that of mobile), the company sees mobile as vital to growing overall market share.
With that in mind, the team gained board level support for mobile-first developments and began to focus on user experience and site speed optimisations. As part of this initiative, the team created 1.4 million AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) variants of existing site pages to help customers on mobile devices to find information and make purchases easily. Launching AMP on RS Components’ UK mobile site has already produced a 15% reduction in the bounce rate and a 29% uptick in the conversion rate.
The mobile optimisations have driven most of the positive changes RS Components have seen over the last year, achieving a year over year revenue growth rate of more than 30%, approaching five times that of desktop.
“The results have played a key part in influencing our roadmap for the next financial year, with a very heavy focus on site speed optimisation – which we hope to achieve via moving all our entry pages to the cloud – as well as the integration of new payment options.”
– Richard Giazzi, Senior Product Owner for Mobile, RS Components
Seeing cross-device usage continuing to increase, the team plans to separate their mobile paid marketing budget from that of desktop so that they can further experiment and understand their value attribution model. They believe this approach will provide better insight into how customers research, add items, share baskets, and ultimately checkout using different devices.
For 2019 they have scoped the rollout of several PWA (Progressive Web Apps) features including offline function, push notifications, and strategic caching. Site speed is also being continuously improved, which has led to a reduction of more than 20% in front-end page load time so far.
“Our partnership with Google is essential in accelerating and optimising our mobile proposition in becoming one of the key pillars of growth and innovation for RS, as well as an important catalyst to proliferating a mobile-first culture throughout the company.”
– Richard Giazzi, Senior Product Owner for Mobile, RS Components
