Case Study Shimano
AMS supports major B2B sales spike of outdoor equipment
4
years of AMS support
50%
reduction in checkout steps
Rackspace
to AWS migration
The Situation
They unwaveringly promote the enjoyment of the outdoors with gear for fishing and biking. We helped them support an accelerated digital sales spike during a pandemic.
In 2018, we partnered with Shimano’s North America IT team for Application Management Services (AMS) to continuously improve their online B2B experience and optimize their SAP Commerce platform. Through that process, our AMS experts quickly discovered several issues that were holding Shimano’s site back from peak performance.
“The team at Smith continues to be responsive to our needs in this ever-changing digital landscape.”
Stuart Cureton – Digital Product Manager, Shimano
The Work
We began by suggesting UX improvements to enhance Shimano’s B2B customer experience. Several improvements were made, including to product detail pages (PDPs), product list pages (PLPs), and search result pages (SRPs), as well as the shopping cart and the checkout process. We then partnered with Shimano to simplify their checkout process, reducing it from four steps to two to help buyers checkout faster. We also migrated Shimano’s website hosting from Rackspace to Amazon Web Services (AWS), enabling improved flexibility and performance.
Real Results
After the launch of these improvements in February 2020, the realities of the pandemic set in. Beginning in March, lockdown life sparked a massive lift in the popularity of outdoor pastimes like fishing and cycling. The work completed as part of Shimano’s standard AMS service agreement to migrate to a new host, stabilize the system, and build new templates allowed their site to scale and handle the large increase in website traffic with ease.
