With several different recreational brands in its portfolio, Exxel Outdoors has to ensure that all of its online functions are streamlined to fit every channel consumers may use to access its sites.
Thus far, Exxel Outdoors has migrated seven of its e-Commerce sites to the BigCommerce platform, including Insta-bed, Kelty, Sierra Designs, Slumberjack, Tailgaterz and Wenzel. The migration, which has nearly doubled mobile conversion rates since the implementation took place in early 2016, has been an overall success for the retailer.
“Mobile is very important to us,” said Cory Barnes, Digital Marketing Manager for Exxel Outdoors. “If you look at the percentage of visitors that are using mobile devices or tablets, the number increases every year. We expect that trend to continue and we want to make sure that someone on our site is having a great experience no matter what device they’re on.”
Advertisement
With a streamlined e-Commerce and mobile presence from BigCommerce, Exxel Outdoors has:
-
Increased conversion rates and total revenue;
-
Reduced site bounce rates;
-
Decreased page load time;
-
Reduced online hosting costs; and
-
Built mobile-optimized, responsive pages for every brand.
“When I was looking for a new platform, I had specific goals in mind,” Barnes said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “One of them was to reduce the total cost of ownership, meaning the monthly hosting costs and the amount we’d have to pay to developers to maintain that platform every month. I wanted that platform to be suitable for all our sites, from the largest — Kelty — all the way down to the smallest.”
Kelty.com has undergone the biggest overhaul, with the retailer redesigning product detail pages and adding more videos in an effort to bolster merchandising efforts.
Bringing More Control In-House
As part of the implementation, BigCommerce recommended partner web development agency Weizen Young to develop the new e-Commerce sites for the Exxel brands.
“The fact that we can make a lot of these changes ourselves and/or with our development partner, faster than when we did it with our old platform, has really been another main benefit for us,” Barnes noted.
Aside from boosting operational functionality and consumer experiences, Exxel Outdoors sought to put more control in the hands of its business users and reduce their learning curves, so they could more easily manage the sites’ back-end operations. With the previous platform, which was more developer-intensive, the retailer often had to defer to a developer to make changes to the site.
“In other words, less time loading new products and more time marketing those products instead,” Barnes said. “I wanted to have the ability to implement future site enhancements and redesigns very quickly, and integrate within our present ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics NAV.”
With the success of the newly designed sites, Exxel Outdoors will next shift its focus toward remodeling its Ultimate Direction and Slumberjack e-Commerce brand sites, and building out new online sites for the Suisse Sport and X20 Watersports brands during the next few months.
