Exxel Outdoors sees triple digit mobile growth

The Exxel Outdoors Success Story

Exxel Outdoors is the parent company for 10 sports and outdoors sites. Each site ranges in size, from the small business to the well-known national brand. The company prides itself on a lean business model and a startup mentality.

But in 2015, with 7 sites on ASP.net, one on WordPress and another on BigCommerce, the headache of managing various content and ecommerce systems was weighing on the small team.

That’s when their mobile traffic increased and the team noticed that revenue didn’t follow. ASP.net sites weren’t efficient for their team, so they took it on themselves to relaunch 8 sites on BigCommerce, including moving one over from Wordpress.

Today, the team has launched an additional brand, as well, making BigCommerce the platform backbone for all 10 of Exxel Outdoors’ websites.

ASP.net storefronts were difficult to manage

As told to BigCommerce by Cory Barnes, Digital Marketing Manager for Exxel Outdoors.

Mobile is very important to us. 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.

Previously, most of our sites were on ASP.net storefronts. On ASP.net, every ecommerce store’s mobile site required separate content management from the main site.

It’s hard enough to oversee content across your desktop site, let alone remembering to do it on mobile. With so many moving parts, it’s easy to forget, “Oh yeah, I need to get a separate image created for the mobile site.”

If we added or removed a category on the desktop site, that wouldn’t flow through to mobile. Or if we updated the home page on the desktop site, we had to upload a separate image for mobile. What it meant was a lot of inaccurate or outdated content on the home pages, and that’s confusing for customers.

All of those things added up to a really poor user experience and low conversion rate.

We knew we needed to find a new solution.

BigCommerce vs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs. Magento

As told to BigCommerce by Cory Barnes, Digital Marketing Manager for Exxel Outdoors.

We also looked at Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud was way too expensive for us and we weren’t keen on the revenue-sharing aspect of it.

Magento—I like Magento and I’ve worked with Magento before—but we needed a fast solution where we wouldn’t have to worry about the technical aspects of the migration. There was also a cost involved; moving to Magento would have been significantly more expensive.

BigCommerce was the best fit for us especially given the size of our business and the fact that we have multiple brands—from the very small, like Insta-Bed, to the very large, like Kelty—that all needed to be on the same platform.

BigCommerce and Weizen Young do data and design

As told to BigCommerce by Cory Barnes, Digital Marketing Manager for Exxel Outdoors.

We migrated our sites in stages because we wanted to test the smaller sites first. We’d do the smaller sites, work out all the bugs, and then move onto the bigger ones. We started with Slumberjack and worked our way up to Kelty and Sierra Designs.

We worked with BigCommerce internally on migrating the data over, while our BigCommerce partner development firm in Canada, Weizen Young, worked on the design of the sites simultaneously.

Weizen Young took an existing BigCommerce template and modified it to match the look and feel of the existing sites.

By the way, I can’t say enough good things about Weizen Young; without them none of this would have happened. They’re fantastic!

Meanwhile, the BigCommerce migration team migrated over all the products, categories, content and data from our old site.

Once we had the data migration and the design done, we hooked it up to our back end system—Microsoft Dynamics NAV—and began integrating it with Listrak, Google Tag Manager and all those things. Then we went live one site at a time.

In all, the whole product discovery process is much better than it used to be, and the checkout is much easier on BigCommerce.

All 10 of our sites are on BigCommerce now. It’s working great.

Responsive design and increased bandwidth for product marketing led mobile conversion to skyrocket

As told to BigCommerce by Cory Barnes, Digital Marketing Manager for Exxel Outdoors.

The number one benefit of re-platforming is the responsive site. Now our mobile conversions are increasing rapidly. Mobile conversion rate is up 272% and mobile revenue is up 193% since this time last year.

I’m obviously very pleased with our growth and I definitely attribute it to our re-platform and our new mobile sites.

Mobile-friendly is now table stakes

As told to BigCommerce by Cory Barnes, Digital Marketing Manager for Exxel Outdoors.

One of the main goals was to have every single one of our sites be responsive and boost up those conversion rates for our mobile visitors. That was a minimum requirement for the platform.

Another goal was to reduce the total cost of ownership, meaning monthly hosting costs and the amount we’d have to pay to developers to maintain that platform every month.

We also wanted a user-friendly admin. We didn’t want to be saddled with a steep learning curve when someone had to add products or set up promotions.

Finally, I wanted the new platform to be suitable for all our sites, from the largest—Kelty—all the way down to the smallest. Those requirements, along with budgetary concerns, were the factors that led us to BigCommerce.

Ease of use and support as needed

As told to BigCommerce by Cory Barnes, Digital Marketing Manager for Exxel Outdoors.

We spend less time loading new products and more time marketing those products instead. Now we can make changes ourselves, faster than we did it with our old platform. Having an admin that’s intuitive and easy to learn has been huge for us.

I had a support rep from BigCommerce walk me through the admin and show me the basics, but the interface is really intuitive and I didn’t find it too challenging.

I work with a digital marketing coordinator and she also found it very easy to work with the platform and learn how to use it. I was pretty happy with that.

Altogether, we’re now running ten BigCommerce sites.