How SOG Knives Migrated to BigCommerce and Drove More Sales

SOG Knives had a Magento 1 site running on bare metal hosting. The site was showing its age contributing to slow performance and a customer experience leaving much to be desired. At the time, Mercutio was helping SOG with development support of the M1 site. When SOG started looking at upgrading their ecommerce technology, Mercutio introduced the idea of freeing themselves of managing servers, security updates and patch releases moving to the world of cloud based web applications and BigCommerce.

In order to meet a hard deadline, the project was split up into 2 phases: Phase 1 was the platform migration onto BigCommerce using the existing site design and included an integration with SOG’s Great Plains ERP system using our Knect platform. Phase 2 was a full redesign of the site driven by a major brand update. As part of the redesign, we utilized Contentful as a CMS providing a sophisticated system to manage content for product merchandising and branded content.

The phase 1 platform migration was completed in 110 days (including the ERP integration) and in time for holiday sales. During the 2019 holiday season, SOG saw a tripling of mobile conversion and we knocked almost 8 seconds off the average page load time. The migration was also a good opportunity to update associated services such as fraud protection, credit card processing and taxes to modern services using Signifyd, Authorize.net and Avalara. With all of these services being app based with BigCommerce, we eliminated the need for custom integration work. Mercutio’s Knect platform provided the integration between BigCommerce and Great Plains, where we made sure orders were flowing into the ERP system, ready for the uptick in sales.

While we were busy migrating the site onto BigCommerce, the SOG team was busy creating a new brand position and visual brand update. The second phase of the project included a full redesign of the site to match the new branding and launch the site in time for SHOT show. The Mercutio design team was excited about the design opportunity as the website was the first large execution of the new brand. Contentful was selected as a CMS providing the ability for the SOG team to manage content and the interlinks between brand content and products. The site architecture brings content from Contentful into Stencil which utilizes the BigCommerce hosting infrastructure keeping the site wicked fast (yes, that is a technical term) on all devices.

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