The idea is both beautiful and simple: instead of cutting trees, how about renting potted, living ones for Christmas. Keep them for a month and then return to their habitat and rebuild their ecosystem.
RentXmasTree.com has been doing this since 2009 and it has been an amazing success in the Monterey Bay area in California.
But now, almost 10 years later, as their stock and clientele continues to grow in size and geographic location, a more robust, streamlined and elegant online ordering system was needed.
The challenge: as a seasonal product, 95% of the traffic for one year would come to the site in 10 days, right after Thanksgiving. Any downtime, slowdown or buggy site at peak time would be devastating for both RentXmasTree and people preparing for the holidays.
Legacy site
The previous rentxmastree.com was built in 2012 and was never updated since.
The new idea
The new design needed to deliver three key elements fast: the premise, the process and the product.
The new design
The new homepage of rentxmastree.com approved in the first round of revisions.
scope & timeline
Day 1
Planning
We identified our client’s top priorities since the unique nature of the service and market and translated the specs to a feasible scope with non-negotiable end dates.
Designing
The design was created to allow visitors to be funnel into conversion with the least amount of friction or complexity. To convey the freshness and evoke the holiday spirit, close up image of trees were used as backgrounds.
Building
Coding was done line by line, writing a fully customized CMS, e-Commerce application and delivery address search integrating with Google Maps API.
Optimizing
The online store was built to be fully mobile friendly, intuitive and using just the right amount of animation to improve the UX/UI but keep the process simple, error-free.
Copywriting
We wrote the copy for the entire site using as a model the legacy website. We added the FAQs to reduce reading fatigue and organize the content in easy to digest layout blocks.
Publishing
We provisioned, configured and deployed a high performance hosting server with load balancers, CDN, aggressive caching, compression and RAID redundancy and special emphasis was given to security, from SSL certificates to firewalls.
Promoting
Thanks to the long history of the business, their SEO ranking was already established, so we prioritize improving their search engine result positions with the new system.
day 35
For a company that started the service as a way to improve and preserve the environment by reducing tree cutting, their ecological footprint is a priority, so special attention was given to the delivery and pickup of trees.
RentXmastree.com already had very specific delivery zones and costs, so we had to build an way to ensure the visitor was in one of those delivery zones.
Using Google Maps API, we created a custom range finder by zip code. This would determine if delivery was possible and the cost. The application also took into account adjacency to highways and routes used to reach other delivery zones.
Easy to use
The ordering system checks if the visitor’s is in one of the delivery zones and then calculates the delivery cost for the order.
Detailed order reports
The client can track by the hour the amount of orders and optimize customer support better.
Custom CMS
Adding and editing content is as easy as filling out forms.
Product tracking
Organized by size, each tree kind includes SKU and inventory tracking.
Ultra fast loading
The system was built to offer the fastest possible loading time per page to reduce wait abandonment, a common occurrence in e-commerce sites.
Average page loading speed
"Everybody loves it"
Our clients keep giving us compliments for how easy and clean the site is. So far, we have broken all records for orders from our previous years and still have to find a client reporting issues while ordering.
Monica H, Owner