ColourPop Cosmetics, an up-and-coming cosmetics company with a cult-like following, engaged Crowd Favorite to scale their site in anticipation of record high Cyber Monday sales.
Challenge
After a secret product launch over the Summer crashed ColourPop’s eCommerce solution, leadership had reservations about whether its site could be scaled to support the unprecedented traffic spikes expected on Cyber Monday.
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Solution
Through load testing and strategic website analysis, Crowd Favorite built and optimized many pieces of site infrastructure allowing ColourPop.com to support enterprise-scale activity—one sale every second at the height of Cyber Monday 2015, ensuring they wouldn’t fail as a result of having achieved so much success.
Results
On Cyber Monday 2015, ColourPop closed more sales—both in volume and gross dollar amount—than they had in all of 2014 combined. They peaked at around 2,000 add-to-carts clicks per minute, closing 5-10 sales every second.
With zero interruptions or downtime, ColourPop was able to deliver the best service and shopping experience to their customers. This success was a launching point for ColourPop, exceeding eCommerce expectations, while continuously focusing on the experience for their customer.
150%
Annual Revenue Increase on Cyber Monday
2,000
Add-to-cart clicks per minute*
2 seconds
Average time between each sale
For ColourPop, Cyber Monday 2015 resulted in such impressive results and record breaking high sales that they cancelled the upcoming December promotion, allowing them to focus on satisfying the demand from Cyber Monday.
When ColourPop first engaged Crowd Favorite, they had just experienced a site crash, due to an unpublicized product launch that brought about an unexpected traffic spike of more than 30x the usual load. The new brand of trendy, affordable cosmetics—sold strictly online—had quickly gained a cult-like following: roughly 1MM site visitors a day, steadily growing by about 20% every month. Despite the fact that business was booming, ColourPop was now worried about their eCommerce solution, WooCommerce, being a truly enterprise-grade platform. The platform needed to scale to the traffic spikes they were already seeing, as well as the record numbers they were anticipating on Cyber Monday.
Together, Crowd Favorite and ColourPop began strategizing with one goal in mind: to maximize, in every possible way, the performance of ColourPop’s existing site. Working through the entire customer purchasing journey, Crowd Favorite conducted several rounds of vigorous testing and analysis of the website, updating and optimizing the performance along the way.
The first sign of a server bottleneck and decreased site performance was customers adding items to their cart. In this stage of the purchasing cycle, even a fraction-of-a-second delay would have a negative snowball effect on the site’s overall performance. To measure the stress of the site, a new metric was created: “add-to-carts per minute.” This metric created a benchmark for tracking site performance by observing traffic patterns during high-volume promotions.
To save ColourPop the hassle of manually compiling custom reports and eliminating the wait times needed to generate them, Crowd Favorite built a custom reporting system tailored to ColourPop’s specific needs that automatically generated nightly reports for their team. ColourPop also received tools and tracking to help identify and cancel fraudulent orders quickly.
Focusing on enhancing site performance, while maintaining an optimal user experience led to features that allowed customers easy, automatic log-in capabilities and quick check-outs.
Additional Site Statistics
- On Cyber Monday 2015, the company, whose average lipstick sells for $6, did over seven figures in sales.
- On Cyber Monday 2015, ColourPop generated more revenue than they had in all of 2014.
- On average, ColourPop closed one sale every two seconds on Cyber Monday 2015.
ColourPop heard from a couple different sources that Crowd Favorite would be the people that could handle this kind of problem for them, both from their internal devs and WP Engine. Because of our position as being enterprise-grade focused – they knew that we dealt with scale and large problems like this.
Karim Marucchi
CEO, Crowd Favorite
Crowd Favorite’s ability to customize the right eCommerce solution to handle exponential website traffic allowed ColourPop to set record high sales- 150% annual revenue increase on Cyber Monday. ColourPop has continued to experience exponential growth and this platform helped enable them to achieve over 70x growth over the last 5 years.
To learn more about our enterprise services and eCommerce solutions, contact us.
