Yeti Cycles Adopts Headless Commerce to Merge CX With Powerful E-Commerce Engine
Yeti Cycles, headquartered in Golden, Colorado, was founded in 1985 before mountain biking was even considered an industry. The brand quickly found its niche in making world-class racing bikes. Over the years Yeti Cycles has grown into one of the most famous racing teams in mountain bike history, winning numerous world and national championships. The company has also been a leader in advancing the industry, continuously developing bikes that define and push the boundaries of the sport.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit last year, there was renewed demand for outdoor fitness products and the cycling industry as a whole saw overwhelming demand from consumers. While Yeti Cycles was already seen as a premium bike brand with a beautifully designed website that suited the brand's needs well, there were challenges with managing the website and connecting back-end systems, which increased the ability of the marketing team to run the website without effectively managing the website, severely limited support from a developer.
Create customer experience
In 2020, many brands were concerned with survival. Businesses needed to innovate because retail sales were almost entirely online. Every business had to adapt in some way, whether it was setting up a website to sell direct to consumers for the first time, or optimizing an up-to-date platform. Yeti Cycles fell into the latter category.
The company used a range of ecommerce tools including Shopify, Magento 1, and Readymag, and needed the help of a developer anytime their marketing team wanted to add new content or product. This was a big challenge. Desiring to build a new website on a single back-end platform to improve usability and give more control to the internal teams, Yeti Cycles hired The ZaneRay Group to design a new online store that would include a engaging, customer-centric website combined with powerful e-functions -Commerce engine that drives and connects him behind the scenes.
The ZaneRay team found that the old website had few options for customizing product pages and cross-selling goods. More importantly, Yeti's primary goal was to bring consumers closer to the brand culture and show the experiences only possible with a Yeti. The company wanted consumers to see the bikes in action on the website, but the website's limitations forced it to prioritize updates based on whether resources were available to make the changes. Yeti Cycles was also forced to check that the updates were worth the time and expense.
Find the right balance
Yeti Cycles knew the key to solving their problems was finding the right balance between creating and maintaining a premium branded experience and updating and improving ecommerce performance. This requires a solid back-end and a versatile front-end interface to deliver a superior end-to-end shopping experience. For Yeti Cycles the solution was clear: the company needed to leverage the emerging mindless retail architecture to best serve both its brand and retail needs.
Headless commerce platforms give merchants the freedom to create and customize their websites and take full control of the customer experience (CX). Yeti Cycles and ZaneRay researched several SaaS ecommerce platforms before landing on BigCommerce for its flexible API framework. BigCommerce has proven to be the platform best suited to serving the brand's needs.
Design and functional improvements were made to the website to create a complete branding experience that customers could also use to identify their local brick and mortar stores or online retailers for purchasing bicycles. While Yeti Cycles doesn't sell its bikes directly to consumers, it does offer a line of premium apparel that can be purchased on the website. Behind the scenes live the pro and B2B e-commerce stores, where retailers and racing teams build and buy bicycles. Organizing complex product and bike customization data and then connecting it to all of the applications that use them proved to be a monumental task given the way it takes to support the purchase of a fully customizable bike online. Yeti Cycles is powered by BigCommerce's Open SaaS solutions and now has the advantage of integrated back-end systems so the team can make in-depth site customizations based on data-driven insights - quickly and independently, without the need for a developer.
The results
Leveraging BigCommerce product data, reusable components and ZaneRay's design system, the Yeti Cycles marketing team can now create new websites, upload real-time content and fully automate new product launches in minutes. What used to take weeks to sometimes a month now needs moments to upload and plan.
For example, the company released its new SB115 bike model just four days after the website launched. About a month later, a new limited edition ARC model was launched for the 35th anniversary. The marketing team created the product page seamlessly, taking advantage of a mindless architecture and BigCommerce product data.
That launch enabled the most site traffic Yeti Cycles had seen in years, with 85,500 page views and over 38,000 sessions from 32,500 users. In addition, the bike sold out in less than two hours. Since launching the new website with BigCommerce, Yeti Cycles has increased its number of users by 53 percent, the number of sessions by 44 percent and the number of page views by 36 percent compared to the previous year.
Headless Commerce sets the bar for businesses that want best-in-class commerce tools with the benefit of creating and supporting a richer, better-quality branded experience and using a more robust CMS to support those experiences. The Yeti Cycles website is much more than a place to buy products. It creates deep connections with its customers by providing a comprehensive expression of the brand, engaging them on a deeper level and inspiring them to purchase.
In the future, Yeti Cycles will focus on expansion efforts. As one of the few mountain bike brands with a premium clothing line, the company plans to introduce three new collections. The improvements made to its website through BigCommerce and ZaneRay allow for even more granular marketing efforts to explore new channels for more seamless product launches.
Kirk Cornelius is a strategic director at The ZaneRay Group, a design and development agency.
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