VANCOUVER, British Columbia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Wine.com, the #1 online wine retailer, has selected Strangeloop to accelerate its website, delivering a faster user experience to millions of shoppers.
“When we researched front-end optimization vendors, Strangeloop was by far the leading contender,” said Geoffrey Smalling, CTO of Wine.com. “Their Site Optimizer is the only product that can handle enterprise scale via appliance or cloud, and they are the only company with experience in accelerating global sites and an aggressive plan for further product development to keep sites like Wine.com at the front edge of acceleration. And on a day-to-day basis, Strangeloop’s customer service has been superb throughout the entire implementation process. Strangeloop has even developed optimizations based on our unique, regulated business.”
With more than a million registered users and an inventory of 13,000+ products, Wine.com has seen huge growth in the past year alone. In 2011, the company shipped more than two million bottles of wine, a 35% increase over the previous year. In addition to offering wine and wine-related gifts and accessories, the website houses a growing online community of more than 32,000 members who provide customer reviews and ratings, as well as creating and sharing personal wine lists.
“Wine.com demonstrates exactly why our product works so well for huge e-commerce sites,” said Jonathan Bixby, CEO of Strangeloop Networks. “Our Site Optimizer doesn’t just make individual pages faster. It takes a big-picture approach and analyzes all of a site’s traffic – looking at millions and millions of visitor paths – and uses this information to make sophisticated, on-the-fly decisions about optimizing a customer’s entire journey through the site. But optimization doesn’t end with one visit. E-commerce sites succeed or fail on their ability to attract return customers, but most websites don’t take advantage of this behavior. Site Optimizer takes what it learns about each visitor to serve pages even faster the next time that person comes to your site. Techniques like these are what separate advanced performance solutions from the rest of the field.”
Tackling site speed for desktop users is just the first phase in Wine.com’s performance strategy. The company recently launched a robust, feature-rich mobile site that not only gives customers access to the full range of products, but also allows shoppers perform location-based searches, manage their accounts, and track orders. Accelerating this mobile site is a top priority.
“We’re looking forward to the release of Strangeloop’s Mobile Site Optimizer at the beginning of 2012,” said Mr. Smalling. “We spent a long time developing our mobile site, because we wanted to make sure it could deliver a first-class experience to our customers. Making that experience even faster is our next order of business.”
How Strangeloop’s site optimization technology works
Strangeloop offers a patented easy-to-implement solution to the complex challenges of web content optimization (WCO). WCO technology takes HTML that has been optimized for readability, supportability and maintainability and, while retaining these benefits, transforms it to HTML that is optimized for fast page rendering. This involves implementing numerous best practices such as rewriting object names, re-ordering when and how objects are rendered, re-ordering when scripts are executed, and optimizing content based on the requesting browser.
In the past, this time-consuming work could only be performed manually by developers with specific performance expertise. The Strangeloop Site Optimizer and Mobile Site Optimizer – which are available as a cloud-based service, a hardware appliance, and a virtual appliance – transform web content optimization from a lengthy and complex coding process into an automated function performed in real time by an intelligent appliance.
Companies like eBay/PayPal, Visa, and Petco have implemented Strangeloop solutions to speed up their websites and enterprise applications. As a result, they've achieved dramatic gains in key metrics, increasing sales by up to 22% and growing organic search traffic by up to 10%.
About Strangeloop
Strangeloop is the leader in providing next-generation web content optimization (WCO) solutions. The earliest entrant in the WCO space, Strangeloop was the first company to market an automated solution – the Strangeloop Site Optimizer – with the ability to tackle front-end performance problems as a service via the cloud. The Strangeloop Mobile Site Optimizer is the only advanced optimization solution that addresses the unique challenges of delivering faster sites to mobile users. Strangeloop was also the first company to integrate Google’s SPDY protocol into its product offerings. Strangeloop is based in Vancouver, BC. For more information, visit www.strangeloopnetworks.com.
About Wine.com
Wine.com is the nation’s #1 online wine retailer, offering thousands of wines, wine gifts, gift baskets and monthly wine clubs. Wine.com’s mission is to be the ultimate resource for wine enthusiasts, whether shopping for themselves or a gift. Wine.com offers a combination of selection, value, service and detailed product information that is impossible to find in a brick and mortar store. Wine.com is the world’s most visited wine website and also runs the wine flash sales site, WineShopper. Wine.com is majority owned by Baker Capital. For more information: visit www.wine.com, the Wine Notes Blog, Facebook page, Twitter, or download the iPad app. Visit www.WineShopper.com or on Facebook and Twitter.