The Client
The 99 Cents Only Stores is a premier deep-discount retailer that carries name-brand consumable and general merchandise. With more than 350 stores in four states and two distribution centers in California and Texas, 99 Cents Only Stores are the leading extreme value retail chain in the Western United States.

The Situation
The 99 Cents Only store recently welcome new ownership, in addition to a leadership team made up of retail industry veterans from Walmart and Sam’s Club. Charged with revitalizing the company, the new team updated the 99 Cents Only brands and expanded its reach into new markets and geographic areas. As a result, sales have grown significantly in spite of declines in virtually every other area of retail.

The Challenge
The company’s flagship site, however, had the dingy outdated, and “in disrepair” feel of one of the chain’s older stores. The site, www.99only.com, needed to reflect the organization’s refreshed value proposition and expanded product categories, while engaging an increasingly mobile customer population and driving them into the store. Overall, the website was hurting, not helping, the organization’s digital marketing efforts.

The Solution
To build a site that was customer-first, 99 Cents Only began the project by conducting user-experience workshops. Armed with insights from customer fanatics, 99 Cents Only was able to pinpoint key use cases, such as the ability to locate a store or to view store details. In there, these key use cases informed the page layouts to curate an initiative user journey.

The site was built on Acquia Cloud using a modular, component-based approach, which means that www.99only.com is mobile-first. The reusable component-based structure offered with Acquia Cloud allowed for 99 Cents Only to expedite time-to-market and to complete development in less than 10 weeks. Other advantages of Acquia Cloud included top security and scalability, in addition to efficient code deployment tools that enabled low-effort, zero-downtime deployments.

At Acquia, we want our customers to build on their own terms. 99 Cents Only was able to take advantage of the flexibility inherent to the Acquia Platform by building an integration with Google Maps API to create a customized store locator, which is scalable and optimized for mobile. Additionally, Digital Bridge Solutions helped 99 Cents Only integrate with its prefered third-party social media aggregation tool, which allowed 99 Cents Only to curate and amplify a stream of customer social medias posts that highlight the amazing deals available in stores.

The Results
The 99 Cent Only’s new flagship site now features an industry-leading store locator experience that supports the company’s primary goal: to get a user into its stores.

Website development was complete in less than 10 weeks

• 13 percent increase in pageviews
• 18 percent increase in visitors
• 155 percent increase in unique actions to get directions to a store
• 53 percent increase in email signups