Custom Software Solutions for Professional Services
THE CLIENT:
This leading network of global companies specializes in the authentication, preservation, and restoration of collectible items such as coins, comic books, and stamps. They provide collectors with objective and impartial grading and authentication that instills confidence in buyers and sellers. Their vast offering of expert services restores beloved memorabilia and removes the uncertainty that can come with making substantial purchases.
THE BUSINESS NEED:
Ultimately, the business wanted to shift from a place where collectors came for a service to a place where they could come to engage with community members on the internet. They recognized the need for collectors to have a central hub that would provide resources, educate collectors, display collections, protect users, and establish a community of like-minded people sharing similar passions and hobbies.
The business hoped that increasing their online offerings would allow them to entice a broader audience and improve retainment of their current members. In shifting the focus from services provided to creating the best possible collecting experience, they would be forging new territory in the space and differentiate themselves from their competitors.
WHAT GENECA DID:
Geneca worked to add a variety of new resources to the client’s website to keep collectors coming back. Instead of promoting services, these new features focused on building a community that gave users ample opportunity to connect. The client is now able to offer collectors a wealth of educational information including price guidelines, grading standards, and counterfeit protection.
We also helped to build a collectibles registry that incentivizes users to take advantage of additional service offerings and collect more items to complete sets and thus earn recognition for their efforts and even cash prices that totaled into the tens of thousands in the past year. We also developed a ‘lookup’ feature that let users easily enter in a chosen collectible and view all the information they could ever hope to see about that item.
As a main goal of this client is to grow their online collectibles community, we also helped to address some scalability challenges. At the start, we migrated hosting to AWS to reduce the load on their server for a customer-facing database. This expansion will allow continued growth without hindering performance.
Rapid growth meant that the client was uploading nearly 50,000 images of collectibles each day, and the Node.js technology in place was struggling to process fast enough. We devised a new approach using Docker containers and Elastic Beanstalk that would handle this huge increase in data processing at once.
THE RESULTS:
Our efforts helped to position this client as an innovative leader in the collectibles industry. This one-stop-shop approach to their website proved to be a real differentiator from their competition, even inspiring imitation. Collectors were far more engaged, now flocking to the site to show off their collections, research and learn, and plan what they wanted to acquire next.
In just a couple of years, we were able to increase page views by percentages in the double digits. The client also saw longer length of stays by users, improved retention, more submissions for services, and an increase in new memberships.
They also have big plans for the future that looks to bring even more revenue, relying on technology to provide the best experience for all members of their newly minted online collectors community.
