When Justin Olson, Director of Digital Commerce at 1-800-CONTACTS and Josh Stanley, former Associate Director of Product Management at 1-800-CONTACTS but now technology product manager at Zappos.com, sat down to develop a project charter for their mobile website, they realized many of the challenges they were facing with their then m.site could be solved by implementing responsive design. At the time, 1-800-CONTACTS was using a solution provider that hosted their mobile platform externally, making maintenance of their mobile site difficult and hard to scale.

After outlining the issues they were having with their external provider, Justin and Josh got in contact with the team over at 5th Finger who wrote some code in order to build them a responsive website for mobile and tablet. The benefits of responsive design are multi-fold but one of the most appealing is the ability to seamlessly deliver integrated content across all platforms with the unified code base. Other benefits includes deeplinking support and and an increase organic SEO by 20% on average.

Once the responsive website had been created, 1-800-CONTACTS A/B tested their previous m.site versus the new responsive site they had created with 5th Finger and found some staggering results! The conversion rate on the responsive mobile site was up 10% from the m.site and the conversion rate on the responsive tablet site was up 17%. 5th Finger also designed custom home pages for both tablet and mobile, completely re-imagining the tablet homepage in particular.

It was this responsive design project that garnered 1-800-CONTACTS attention from their retail peers whom nominated 1-800-CONTACTS as finalists for the eTail Best-in-Class Awards. The winners of the eTail Best-in-Class awards will be announced tomorrow during lunch here in San Antonio at the eTail West conference!