DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN ECOMMERCE
Concept2
Industry-defining rowing, skiing and biking exercise equipment, in need of a modern, future-friendly website for their products, services and community.
Project Features
About Concept2
Concept2 is the global leader in the innovation and production of rowing oars since 1976, with 98% of rowing medals at the Tokyo Olympics being won with their oars.
In addition to the Concept2 RowErg, which has become a fixture in rowing clubs, homes, gyms, CrossFit boxes, and schools around the world, the company's range of sports-based ergometers now includes the SkiErg and the BikeErg.
Motivation
The pandemic changed the fitness equipment market significantly, and Concept2 now faces increased competition from newcomers.
Therefore, Concept2's new website needs to maintain its current values providing comprehensive information and support, reflecting its position as the market leader and allowing it to promote new offerings, such as ErgData, the free app for iOS and Android devices connected to Concept2 Performance Monitor.
Concept2 started redeveloping its website in 2018, but development stalled in 2020. Due to the delay, the C2 team has decided to restart this project with a new development team.
Concept2 has subsidiaries in the UK, Australia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Benelux Union. Each locale offers its main website to be translated by resellers in other countries. With new countries coming online frequently, Concept2 needs to be able to quickly spin up new versions or create a multi-site experience that works globally.
Current Website Pain Points
- Not mobile-friendly
- Unable to easily edit or add new content
- Clunky shopping experience
- Inability to link replacement parts to machines
- Need more content and visual storytelling options
- Navigation is not user-friendly
- Susceptible to traffic/server overload
- No centralized content or codebase for subsidiary sites
Solution
Create a modern ecommerce website experience using a decoupled infrastructure for maximum flexibility and future scalability.
The main goals of the project:
- to make the site mobile-friendly and improve overall customer experience
- have one website to handle both the marketing and support side content and ecommerce
- reshape the navigation to fit Concept2’s company evolution
- provide a good search experience for customers looking for product or support
- make it easy to maintain the subsidiary websites using a single code base set up and centralize content.
Concept2 decided the new site should be built on Drupal 10 using Drupal Commerce to achieve this. Without in-house development resources, C2 needed a partner agency that could handle the scope of the build and bring it to life in a quick turnaround time.
Using our decoupled accelerator Gesso, and our agile development process, we established a communication and development cadence with Concept2’s internal team and stakeholders, ensuring full Acro Commerce support from discovery through development to launch, starting with their US site, due to launch in October 2023.
Gesso — How a development accelerator makes the difference
Advantages of a decoupled accelerator
- User experience design, frontend and backend work can be carried out in parallel, significantly reducing development time.
- Gesso’s design system is a single source of truth for all components and a reusable library for all of Concept2's subsidiary sites.
- Gesso is not married to any one technology, so integrations with a new or existing service are seamless.
- Built for iteration — Gesso makes future-proofing and scaling easy with Agile-backed processes between aligned projects.
Building the future one stroke at a time
Hampered by an ineffective user experience and threatened by new competition, Concept2 needed to finish an ecommerce development project that stalled in 2020. They need a new website to
- Improve user experience with a modern, responsive design and clear conversion paths.
- Minimize admin effort and overhead by using streamlined processes and newer technologies.
- Maintain stability and security by migrating to an up-to-date, modern, supported platform.
C2's new technical infrastructure is composable, and its flexible decoupled nature is future-ready and scalable, allowing them to adapt to their evolving needs.
The dual-core setup of Drupal CMS and Drupal Commerce is a powerful combination that empowers their non-technical resources to build and maintain an unrivalled customer experience allowing them to become an online leader in their industry.
If these sound like your website development goals, meet with our team today.
"Get a quote from the client project owner about why they chose Acro Commerce and how they feel about the process so far.”
Joe Person, Department/Title, Concept2