CNF Outdoors Case Study

“I have not found a hosting company anywhere that offers such quick turnaround times from query to resolved status.”

Tsohost has supplied CNF Outdoors with hosting for their e-retail offering since February 2012.

CNF Outdoors provides high quality equipment to ensure the ultimate outdoor experience is enjoyed by all. CNF Outdoors stock some of the best brand names across numerous categories including caravan accessories, camping equipment, fishing tackle, car care and water sports equipment.

CNF Outdoors launched in 2008 and gradually obtained a small online presence through the retailing of popular fishing products. In December 2011, with a growing product catalogue and flourishing online presence, CNF Outdoors made the decision to replace their existing cart platform with ‘OpenCart', a feature-rich open-source application favoured by many online retailers.

To capitalise on the benefits offered by ‘OpenCart’, CNF Outdoors required a hosting solution that would guarantee optimal performance of their site, delivering fast load speeds and minimal downtime. The combination of these upgrades would allow CNF to provide a ‘people orientated’ service, inevitably increasing levels of traffic and overall sales.

Tsohost was referred to CNF Outdoors as a reliable and flexible host provider with an excellent support service. Based on this referral CNF Outdoors approached Tsohost in February 2012 with questions on how to realise the potential of their newly adopted ‘OpenCart’ platform, and after gaining a strong understanding of CNF Outdoors requirements, Tsohost recommended the use of a customised Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS).

Owing to the isolated nature of a VDS, a number of things were done to optimise the CNF Outdoors website; in particular, caching was used to load key web pages from RAM, meaning load speeds were much quicker than when the site was hosted on a shared platform. The switch also meant the risk of downtime was considerably reduced and customers received a smoother browsing experience, resulting in an increase to the average 'time spent on site' and a boost to sales.

Further benefits noted by CNF Outdoors were:

• The number of hits to CNF Outdoors have quadrupled.
• The site is achieving a near 100% uptime.
• Google page speed scores the site an outstanding 90 out of 100

“I would certainly recommend Seb and his team. They [Tsohost] have ensured that my site is always perfectly operational from their side of things and what surprised me was the super fast turnaround time.” - Grant Butler, Director at cnfoutdoors.co.uk

To maintain a relevant product range CNF Outdoors regularly add new SKUs to their online offering and are currently working with a new fishing supplier to extend their fishing tackle range.

With the help of Tsohost, CNF Outdoors aim to further increase the level of traffic to CNF Outdoors.