This has to be one of my favorite customer success stories of all time. Last summer, Paul stopped into Ben’s Cycle - a Milwaukee, WI based cycle and fitness shop that he had heard great things about, to pick out a new bike. As he's known to do, he struck up a conversation about the challenges of operating a multi-channel business with the owner of the shop.
I should point out that the word “shop” in this case might be a bit misleading. They may be a family-owned business run in the same neighborhood for the past 80 years, but they aren’t a small shop in any way. Ben’s Cycle stocks over 10,000 products and all 10,000 are available on their website.
They dipped their toe into the world of online retail in 2000 with a presence on eBay and moved to a shopping cart model in 2004. The demands of a growing business and a national customer base caused them to outgrow their existing eCommerce platform. Thankfully, technology has finally started to catch up with the needs of the online retailer and they found a platform with a POS (Point-of-Sale System) that matched their requirements.
Six months from launching the complete replacement for their eCommerce platform, they came to the conclusion that the out-of-the-box search functionality wasn’t good enough. They felt it was lacking important features such as faceted navigation and robust search analytics.
Drew Triplett, Internet Manager at Ben’s Cycle did a great job of summing up one of their greatest challenges: “Our target audience covers the gambit from do-it-yourselfers to casual cyclists. This presents quite a design challenge because each kind of shopper has a different set of needs.”
The perfect way to address this kind of challenge is to offer visitors the ability to search and browse for products with multiple attributes, in any order, and get results that are relevant to them.
Paul's visit to the bike shop turned out to be perfect timing. they set up a free demo of Hawk Search and kicked off the project in record time.
Most companies go into a complete lock-down before the holiday shopping season and not even minor changes are allowed to the website after the beginning of October. Development for the POS platform and the Hawk Search implementation were completed simultaneously and they launched both solutions on November 11, 2013, weeks before the holiday shopping rush.
All of their efforts paid off and Ben’s Cycle experienced their most successful holiday shopping season in history thanks to Hawk Search, their new eCommerce platform, and strategic marketing initiatives.
Not many retailers are willing to risk launching new functionality three weeks before the online holiday rush. But Ben’s Cycle was motivated enough to take a measured risk. The success Ben’s Cycle experienced speaks highly of their team and the solutions they selected.
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