How a New, Mobile-Friendly Website Gave a Fitness Company a Boost in Profits

Angela Mader's business, Fitlosophy, began in 2008, when she started printing fitness and nutrition journals for men and women. Over the years, as sales grew steadily, she expanded into food scales and more journals, among other products. But one number scared her: Fifty-six percent of her online sales were coming from mobile, and yet her website was ancient and unreliable. "Without a mobile-friendly website," she says, "we were seeing a lot of lost sales." Still, she had only a staff of five and annual revenues over $1 million. Could she afford a slick solution?

The Fix

Mader talked to a lot of web-savvy colleagues, and many of them suggested a service called Shopify. It's a simple e-commerce platform that companies can use to build their own online stores. She loved hearing that it's easy to maintain, and that it can manage her site, inventory and mobile sales needs. In June 2015, she switched everything over. "The transition wasn't easy, but I had to do it," Mader says. She had to rebuild her entire catalog on the site's back end. But once she did, she also discovered that Shopify easily integrated with QuickBooks (her accounting tool) and her email-marketing platform. That would save her time in the future.