Their Success With Duda
Universo Online, the largest internet company in Brazil, chose Duda to provide its customers with beautiful websites that can easily be edited for desktop, tablet and mobile.
-
200%
increase in new website sales
-
Custom upsell flows created through API integration
-
Dramatically-reduced website build times for customers
The Opportunity
In Brazil, the internet is mobile. Smartphones are the primary way most consumers access the internet, and the two are inseparable in the minds of most consumers and small businesses throughout the country. And this posed a challenge for UOL, Brazil’s largest internet company.
“UOL Host provides websites to thousands of small business clients across Brazil,” said Victor de Castro Faria, Product Owner at UOL Host. “But for a long time we were using Yola as our website builder, and after a while we had some legacy issues and the mobile designs weren’t up to the standard we needed,” he said. “In Brazil, you have to have a website that works well and looks great on mobile if you’re going to be competitive.”
Faria specifically pointed to Wix as a competitor of UOL in the Brazilian market. Whatever solution they decided on to replace Yola, it had to be very user-friendly for clients with low-to-no tech skills, lead the industry in mobile design flexibility, and enable UOL to create custom upsell flow and plans that bundle websites with other services.
After an in-depth four-month evaluation, UOL chose Duda — a responsive website building platform with a history of leading in the mobile web space — as the new website builder for all of their clients.
Why Duda
“We evaluated seven or eight different website builders before deciding on Duda,” said Faria. “There were a lot of good options, but at the end of the day, we selected Duda over all the others for three primary reasons,” he said.
First, UOL’s team chose Duda for the platform’s ability to easily edit websites for desktop, tablet and mobile, in order to accommodate their clients’ requirement of granular control over how their sites look on mobile.
Secondly, Duda’s website section builder provided UOL’s customers with an entirely new way to build websites. Instead of relying on full website templates that lack design flexibility and hinder a small business owner’s ability to create a truly custom and beautiful website, sections work as website building blocks. With Duda’s sections feature, UOL’s clients can easily select individual headers, “About” sections, “Feature” or “Services” list layouts, and other professionally pre-designed website sections, and insert them directly onto a website in just a few clicks. UOL saw this unique feature as a real game-changer as UOL sees the ability to quickly and easily create a website is crucially important to moving clients through the conversion funnel.
And thirdly, Faria said that Duda’s API documentation is second to none, and meeting with Duda’s development team gave them confidence that UOL could integrate however they needed with the platform and really control their own client conversion.
“All things considered, Duda was by far the best option for UOL and our clients,” said Faria.
Integration & Results
“Once we decided on Duda, their development team really stepped up to make sure we could bring our new website builder to market as quickly as possible,” said Faria. “The Duda team guided us through every part of the integration process to ensure all of our technical requirement were met,” he said.
As an example of the Duda team’s ability to analyze, adapt and overcome any challenges that faced UOL, Faria recalled an issue with IP addresses.
UOL required that all websites originate from a set of static IP addresses so they could track their overall performance on the web against other platforms. This is not a standard setup for Duda, so the team worked very closely with UOL to guide them through the successful setup of a reverse proxy on top of the Duda platform.
After just one month of the development work, Duda and UOL completed a full platform integration with impressive results.
Since launching with Duda, UOL Host has experienced a 200 percent increase in new website sales, which has correlated with an increase in the sale of bundled services such as domains and business mailboxes.
“After the launch, we began a pretty aggressive advertising campaign highlighting the new site builder, and it’s proven to be a great way to get the attention of small businesses that are really looking to take their online presence seriously,” said Faria. “Our clients are much, much happier with the quality of their websites and it’s brought a lot of value to UOL’s service offering. We really look forward to continuing our partnership into the future to keep Brazilian small business on the cutting-edge of the web design industry.”
