Let the users build the products they need...
introducing the cable builder
Show Me Cables supplies cables, connectors, wire, and accessories to networking professionals and consumers. In a very competitive industry, they’ve built their business on expert support, great customer service, and product inventory.
ShowMeCables.com grew out of parent company Integrated Network Cable. Founded in 1995, Integrated Network Cable provides a full range of voice, video, and data network services. As is natural with a network install business, there were large quantities of equipment on hand. Combine that supply with the historical rise of eCommerce, and you have the emergence of ShowMeCables.com. The web was the perfect tool for combining industry knowledge with a full inventory to provide the best service to networking professionals and consumers alike.
Show Me Cables needed to migrate to Magento 2. Their primary driver for the migration was site performance improvement. The networking professionals and other customers of Show Me Cables needed access to a full inventory of products and industry knowledge. Access to these crucial components also needed to be fast.
The company understood website visitors tend to care more about speed than other bells and whistles. Additionally, page loading time had become an increasingly important factor when it came to search-engine rankings. Every second shaved off of load time can boost customer confidence and trust in a site. In those cases, a few seconds can make all the difference.
Overall, Show Me Cables wanted to partner with an agency to:
Classy Llama worked with Show Me Cables on a site build where many of the features were intended to provide parity with their current experience rather than new innovation. The goal here was not to rebrand or add new features, it was to improve the performance for customers.
However, one new component was added to the build to help improve the customer experience when finding the right products. The Classy Llama team built a new, mobile-friendly Cable Builder. The Cable Builder allowed customers to create any combination of connectors and cable desired, within a particular cable class or family.
Through a guided selection of options, a dynamically created product was displayed to the customer. Tiered pricing breakpoints were also provided once the cable was configured with options to order, email, or print the configured cable.
At the end of the build, the look and feel of the site remained similar to the prior build. However, the user’s experience was drastically enhanced and geared more toward Show Me Cables’ main user base – commercial clients. Their new site featured a new, clean design that showcased the client’s reputation for a wide variety of quality products at competitive prices. Add to this a unique cable builder for product configuration and the Show Me Cables’ site was complete.
¹ Tests compared page speed measured by median “Time To First Byte” for 50 sequential requests to the homepage, category page, and product detail page on the old vs new site
² ³ Comparing a 5 month period (Aug-Dec) post-launch to the previous year during the same 5 months