SkyGeek Case Study

“We wanted to revamp our site to make it look better, feel easier to shop and be more user-friendly on the back side. It’s not as easy as you’d think. We went with an interim design during one holiday season and had disastrous results the entire Christmas rush. We found Solid Cactus from a Yahoo! recommendation list. They completely revamped our look and feel and our business has soared. Sales, revenues, order size, they all jumped.”
— Steven Styles, SkyGeek.com

SkyGeek.com buys and sells aerospace materials and products. They sell pilot supplies, head sets, filters, lubricants, hand toolsmore than 6000 items. Their business is about evenly divided between private end users and commercial and government entities. The US military is a big customer, so is Disney World. SkyGeek.com employs 5 people. It grew from a forty year-old family business, and came online in 2001. Solid Cactus did a complete redesign of the site in ’04.

“We designed the logo, and Solid Cactus built an entirely new store around it,” says Steven Styles. “There’s very little of the original.” Solid Cactus loaded up the front end with features to make the site easy to search and easy to shop. The more products a store has, the more shoppers can feel overwhelmed. Solid Cactus added a Best Sellers feature to promote popular items, Featured Items for new products and sales, Cross Sell to interest customers in related products, a Shop by Brand option, Customer Testimonials for recommendations and Left Hand Navigation. “Now we have a clean, professional look,” says Steven. “All of a sudden we look like a huge company.”

On the back end SkyGeek.com added Cactus Complete Commerce. “It sped up our entire back end process,” says Steven. “We went from being able to fill 30 orders a day to filling over 100 a day.”

The numbers tell it all. Sales through Memorial Day of ’06 were up 400% over the previous year. The average order size jumped from $125/order to $225/order. SkyGeek.com is shipping upwards of 1500 orders per month. “The volume is creating a different company,” says Steven. “We traditionally sat on inventory, now it blows out of here fast. Solid Cactus was able to put us on the cutting edge of e-commerce and at the same time actually simplify the process for us. We thought it was too complicated, but they made it easy. The overall look and feel of the site is great.”

Solid Cactus added Search Engine Optimization features so that SkyGeek. com would be easy for the search engines to find. “We’re #3 or #4 on Yahoo! and Google,” says Steven. “We get more genuine customers. That makes a huge difference to sales.”

Steven says the redesign process was painless. “We had one phone call and they nailed our vision.” The redesign paid for itself in less than a year even though SkyGeek.com continued to add Solid Cactus features to their site. They have had pages redesigned and most recently added Multiple Add-To-Cart.

Steven Styles knows that every web site gets the same chance to make a first impression, and Steven Styles understands the difference that impression can make. “We look 100% better and more professional than our competition. We look like a huge company. We operate like a huge company. SkyGeek.com can become a huge company.”