Why Skullcandy Unplugged Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Relaunched on BigCommerce

Skullcandy, a personal audio equipment brand that specializes in wireless headphones, earbuds, and speakers, recently won BigCommerce’s 2018 design award for Best New Website Design.

The journey Skullcandy took to launch an award-winning ecommerce site took many twists and turns but wasn’t atypical for BigCommerce customers.

In fact, from the planning phase to working with technology and design partners to launching its seven international sites to double-digit increases in conversion rates, Skullcandy received BigCommerce’s usual red-carpet treatment.

Skullcandy had previously been on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform as part of its partnership with Astro Gaming.

When Astro Gaming was purchased, Skullcandy evaluated its ecommerce strategy and decided that Salesforce Commerce Cloud was no longer the right fit for the size of Skullcandy’s ecommerce business needs.

The platform was expensive, resource-heavy to maintain, and took an incredible amount of customization and time to provide the type of exceptional customer experience Skullcandy was committed to providing shoppers.

Executive Summary: Moving from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to BigCommerce

Skullcandy launched seven BigCommerce websites—one U.S. site, two Canadian sites, and four European sites—in three languages and in four currencies within six months.

In the first month after launch, the company saw double-digit conversion rate improvement and won an award for the Best New Website Design.

Skullcandy Makes a Game-Changing Move

Skullcandy reviewed twelve ecommerce platforms before choosing BigCommerce for its global websites.

“We needed to go to market quickly so we were forced to basically do a straight site migration without reinventing the wheel on our sites,” said Kinsey Butler, Manager of Ecommerce Strategy at Skullcandy.

“However, while making the transition, we strategically chose to make a couple quick-win optimizations to improve the customer experience and aesthetics of our sites.”

Skullcandy’s main goal was to get customers to its most valuable pages as quickly as possible. The company wanted its shopping experience to:

• Be simple and enjoyable

• Enable customers to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for

• Decrease bounce rates

• Increase conversions across all seven ecommerce sites

To help achieve these goals, Skullcandy engaged The ZaneRay Group, a design and development agency specializing in ecommerce, as well as Jasper, a SaaS product information management (PIM) solution and BigCommerce partner.

Jasper Takes Product Information Management to Another Level

BigCommerce has partnered with Jasper on numerous website implementations. The company is well-known for its world-class product information management capabilities and seamless integration with other systems.

Jasper’s PIM is Skullcandy’s single source of truth for product data.

Skullcandy was able to upload all of its products once—as opposed to seven times for its seven online stores—and then assign them out as necessary based on the product catalog of the various international locations.

“The relationship between us and BigCommerce, us and Jasper, and Jasper and BigCommerce was something we’d never had before,” said Jenny Buchar, Senior Manager of Digital Operations at Skullcandy.

“It was really wonderful. Everyone involved was so dedicated, easy to work with, and an expert at their job so it was truly a rewarding experience.”

Jasper’s PIM is the cornerstone of Skullcandy’s backend operations and has been so effective that the company is rolling it out to the broader business.

The system streamlines Skullcandy’s workflow and publishes to one of its BigCommerce sites individually from the same source.

As the company’s product control center, the PIM keeps a record of all product and marketing data and updates Skullcandy’s global storefronts on command.

“We’re currently just using Jasper as a digital PIM, but by the end of the year we’ll be expanding Jasper to be the PIM for the entire Skullcandy organization,” said Butler.

“In addition to digital, we’ll use it for retail marketing, creative, sales, and any other teams who need product imagery or product information. It will be the first point of contact when people have questions about a product and need an answer.

In our short integration time to date, Jasper’s PIM has proven essential to our business and is highly adaptable. It is capable of meeting our needs in more ways than maybe a PIM should!”

The ZaneRay Group Leads to Award-Winning Site Design

Skullcandy had been working with the ecommerce developers and designers at ZaneRay for about three years, having originally engaged the agency to help inject more branding and experiential content into the site.

After working on several additional major website projects with ZaneRay and eventually deciding to switch ecommerce platforms, Skullcandy asked the agency for help choosing the right solution.

ZaneRay had successfully launched previous sites on BigCommerce and recommended the platform to Skullcandy.

“One of the goals for Skullcandy was to give their team more flexibility and control over their own website,” said Penny Porterfield, Vice President of Operations and Business Development at The ZaneRay Group.

“BigCommerce certainly offered that. Skullcandy didn’t have that with Salesforce, and it was a big factor in their decision to go with BigCommerce.”

Prior to migration, ZaneRay improved the site’s customer journey, navigation, category pages, and product pages.

The agency widened the site and optimized it for mobile, increased the size of assets, ensured everything on the site was on brand, and streamlined the conversion process.

ZaneRay worked closely with the Skullcandy, BigCommerce, and Jasper teams to design a world-class site that was the agency’s most complex implementation on the platform.

The teams met regularly to develop creative solutions to a variety of challenges, ensuring Skullcandy could launch its new site in a short period of time.

“One of the primary things that swayed Skullcandy was the amount of support and partnership BigCommerce offers as a platform,” said Porterfield.

“Another reason was the speed by which they could get onto the platform and get off of Salesforce Commerce Cloud.”

Skullcandy Sites Launch Quickly and Exceed Conversion Goals

BigCommerce launched Skullcandy’s seven websites—one U.S. site, two Canadian sites, and four European sites—in three languages and in four currencies within six months.

“When we looked at the first-month post-launch on BigCommerce and compared it to the month pre-launch on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, we saw double-digit improvements in each part of the purchase funnel,” said Butler.

“From landing on a product detail page to clicking the Place Order button, our new sites’ performance increased dramatically.”

Taking Advantage of Omnichannel Commerce

Millennials are Skullcandy’s target audience, so effectively leveraging social commerce has also been a big priority for the company.

“Younger consumers are completely entrenched in technology and have a million touchpoints at their fingertips that are always changing,” said Butler.

“The ability to meet them where they are, to speak their language, and to be authentic in a way that actually converts is really important to us. BigCommerce makes it easy to integrate with Facebook and Instagram, giving us additional valuable sales channels.”

What’s Next for Skullcandy

Like most businesses, Skullcandy has seen higher website traffic on mobile devices compared to desktops over the past year. Over half of sales now take place on mobile devices.

Skullcandy is moving quickly to leverage BigCommerce’s marketplace and implement apps that can continue to help increase conversions.

The company is in the process of optimizing mobile checkout and plans to add Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other key apps to create an even better shopping experience for customers.

Skullcandy recently launched Facebook Shop and plans to enable shopping on Instagram in the near future as it expands its social commerce capabilities.

The BigCommerce Difference

The ability to have more ownership of its storefront and be more agile across development and site management made BigCommerce the ideal platform for Skullcandy.

“Even the smallest change used to go through a developer, which was costly and time-consuming,” said Buchar.

“Being able to pivot quickly and empower our merchandising or operations people to make updates on the fly is really valuable.

BigCommerce analytics show us when we should change something in a certain way and being able to do that immediately has been a huge bonus.

Long-term, we are excited to grow with BigCommerce and continue to push the envelope in the ecommerce and social commerce space.”