Problem: Cabela's, a cross-channel retailer of hunting, fishing, camping and outdoor merchandise, sought to improve and grow its outdated e-commerce site to enhance the online shopping experience.
Solution: Partnered with an e-commerce solutions company to help launch a new website.
Results: Saw an increase in customer interaction and conversion rates, especially around the holiday season.
With a website design that was over nine years old, Cabela's decided it was time for a change. The site had navigation limitations, as well as limited price and promotional price functionality. These limitations were making it difficult for Cabela's to adapt its business needs to its website, negatively influencing the overall customer experience.
To help with the site overhaul, Cabela's hired Fry, a provider of e-commerce platforms with multichannel solutions. Cabela's chose Fry based on two main elements: one, its focus on the customer shopping experience and, two, the business perspective, with the cost savings Fry offered proving to be the best option.
"We were trying to give online shopping a stronger presence than our previous site," says Mark Thompson, senior director of e-commerce at Cabela's.
Fry's Open Commerce Platform also offered the unique feature of an experience manager, a rich functionality that enables Cabela's to identify shoppers on its site, then send them targeted ads and relevant content they might be interested in based on their previous actions on the site.
Cabela's redesigned site includes numerous other new features, including integrated kiosks, multisite capabilities, new store locators, in-page zoom and swatching, guided navigation, an enhanced "my account" section, and product comparison capabilities.
Cabela's website redesign also included a switch to a wider template, which has given the retailer the ability to center content within the browser screen. The move "gives us more ability to manage content areas to expose our library of content, assests that we have, from buyers guides to field test reports to videos, all the way down to exposing some of our other business channels," Thompson says.
While the redesigned site has added value and enhanced the consumer shopping experience, the changes weren't exactly adopted with praise at first, Thompson recalls. "It's human nature not to like change, so we experienced some initial negative feedback. However, as the site matured through the holiday season, we saw some really good sales performance, conversion performance, as well as customer interaction and comments within the site itself."
Cabela's isn't stopping there. It plans to add even more new technologies to its site to further improve the shopping experience. Free shipping deals and a function that will allow shoppers to add multiple items to their shopping cart from an ensemble page are in the works. Cabela's also plans on adding a feature where shoppers will be able to view in-store inventory.
- People:
- Fry
- Mark Thompson