Driving leading-edge shopping experiences and boost conversions with Shopify Plus

PEARL iZUMi designs, manufactures, and sells high-quality mountain biking, cycling, and outdoor gear with a commitment to sustainable, environmentally friendly business practices, and a focus on building a strong cycling community.

Challenges

PEARL iZUMi was struggling with its current eCommerce platform – bug fixes, maintenance issues, and limitations for merchandising and promotions that were preventing the marketing team from focusing on customer experience and growing the eCommerce business. The team also wanted to bring PEARL iZUMi’s recent rebrand online and launch two international websites. 

Solutions

Migrating PEARL iZUMi from Hybris to Shopify Plus opened up a brave new world for the marketing team, freeing it to take critical next steps in developing its online presence. The marketing team felt empowered to “drive” the site themselves without having to rely on developers. The significant cost reduction in the company’s tech stack and elimination of maintenance issues was a huge weight off. Additionally, re-platforming provided a flexible foundation, enabling the company to scale the site and add enhancements and features over time to continuously provide leading-edge shopping experiences. 

eHouse Studio developed a customized Shopify theme to bring the PEARL iZUMi brand to life online, as well as integrated apps from the Shopify ecosystem to enable key functionality beyond Shopify Plus’ out-of-the-box features, from smart search to personalization. 

New information architecture

eHouse Studio redesigned the website’s information architecture to make it easier to shop, but also showcase PEARL iZUMi’s brand values and identity in various ways. For example, we highlighted the most important brand content in the navigation (i.e., social purpose, sustainability, technology, and innovation in the About menu). We also added categories to the navigation to show PEARL iZUMi’s expertise in all areas of biking and make it easier for customers to find what they want. In addition, we separated clothing from other types of products and grouped together related products for more intuitive shopping. 

Data integration

PEARL iZUMi’s data currently isn’t stored in a centralized database. Instead, data needed for the eCommerce site, including product data, pricing, and inventory, comes from three different platforms. eHouse Studio recommended using Shopify as the “middleman” to pull in data from all three data platforms. In addition, we enabled the team to manually add product content that is not in its database yet to product detail pages (PDPs), and alter sale pricing as needed. 

Personalization for VIPs

PEARL iZUMi offers a Pro Purchase Program for industry professionals, qualified athletes and service reps that provides products at different price points and discounts than for the general public. In addition, PEARL iZUMi participates in the ExpertVoice and Outdoor Prolink programs, offering discounts to influencers who have expertise with PEARL iZUMi products and cycling/mountain biking. We linked Shopify Plus to these programs and enabled a personalized eCommerce experience for these key partners, with different content and offers based on their membership status. 

On-site search and merchandising optimization

PEARL iZUMi needed more control over merchandising its products. eHouse Studio integrated tools to give the brand total control over collection pages and product pages. This enabled the team to leverage custom product logic based on business needs. For example, we integrated SearchSpring to add rules to control the display of search results – which products display and in what order. In addition, we customized how the team can hide or show variants for a product. For example, if a size or color needs to be removed from consumer view in the online store, PEARL iZUMi can hide that variant and not the whole product. In addition, if a product is going to be discontinued or is seasonal, PEARL iZUMi can hide the product once inventory is at zero, versus listing it “out of stock.”

Customer engagement and brand-building

A lot of great lifestyle content was buried in the PEARL iZUMi blog. We enabled the team to more visibly integrate this content into the eCommerce site by creating a new “Inspiration” tab in the navigation – in particular, highlighting and profiling the brand’s highly involved and dedicated Ambassador community members and expert advice.  

In addition, we integrated the Daily Karma Shop for Good app to enable customers to make a donation at checkout to support the brand’s social purpose of changing the world through bikes. 

Localization of international stores

eHouse Studio created the US eCommerce site first and then cloned it quickly and cost-effectively to create an international site and a Canadian site. This approach will serve PEARL iZUMi well into the future should they decide to launch in additional markets. Because the Canada site is a single store, but requires content in both English and French, we integrated a language translation app to give PEARL iZUMi flexibility in localizing content. Using this app has allowed the Pearl iZUMi team to add French translations for any piece of English text content on the site – from navigation links to full-length blog articles. 

Results

eHouse Studio launched a new eCommerce site for PEARL iZUMi with advanced features, more intuitive IA, and customizable CMS modules in approximately 23 weeks. We then cloned and launched the international and Canada stores in a short five weeks.