Case Study: 1-800 Contacts achieves faster load times and improved customer experience with Merkle

1-800 Contacts - Customer Case Study

1-800 CONTACTS, the world's largest contact lens retailer, faced mounting maintenance and reliability issues with its out-of-house mDot mobile site and wanted full internal ownership without sacrificing conversions. Concerned that a responsive rebuild could slow mobile performance and hurt sales, they engaged Merkle | 5th Finger to explore a responsive solution, ultimately selecting the vendor’s ResponsiveJS transformative approach.

Merkle | 5th Finger implemented ResponsiveJS, performed UX discovery, added the library to 1800contacts.com, ran phased A/B testing and trained the internal team to manage the site. The responsive site delivered measurable wins: tablet conversion rates rose 17% and mobile conversions improved 10% versus the mDot site, while load time increased only 0.4s (7.2s vs 6.8s, ~5.5% slower), and 1-800 CONTACTS achieved 100% internal ownership and eliminated the external mDot hosting.

1-800 Contacts