SOG Knives Delivers Cutting Edge Ecommerce Experience with BigCommerce

SOG and Overdose Join Forces to Create a Flawless Site Experience

As told to BigCommerce by Steve Miller, SOG Knives Director of Ecommerce.

When I look back on working with Overdose to launch our BigCommerce site, I view it as one single team that worked together on this project. I’m extremely proud of how we worked together and what we came up with. Based on Overdose’s original proposal, the development costs and time were right on budget. Working with Overdose really was an excellent experience. They had great discipline and great talent, handled everything so well and were so easy to work with. That’s not to say that there weren’t challenges, but we worked through them together and, in the end, they were an ideal partner.

The thing that I appreciate most about Overdose was when I came on board, they were doing maintenance on the website, fixing some of the problems resulting from really sloppy work done by our previous partner. Having spent a lot of time discussing what they can do for us, I realized that Overdose’s ability to help us drive our business was much deeper than merely putting out fires as they arose. So, in addition to partnering with Overdose for site design, site development, and maintenance, I've also now used them as a strategic partner for brainstorming and roadmap preparation, campaign creation, design and more. Really, I use them more as a full service agency, and they've never let us down.

Overdose is essentially part of my team, and I believe they truly care about our business and our brand. I feel like they're an extension of SOG in a way that a lot of other agencies I've worked with haven't been. They're also just fun to work with. I'm happy that we went down this road with them. What we've built with Overdose and the results we’ve created from it is something that can act as a showcase for what Overdose is capable of. They continue to deliver post launch, having recently developed a way to overcome some technical and design challenges that enabled us to sell a category of products we haven’t been able to sell online before. These 13 products currently account for 15% of our total website revenue! Overdose’s work continues to make a huge difference to our business.

Filling In the Missing Pieces

As told to BigCommerce by Steve Miller, SOG Knives Director of Ecommerce.

Some things I love about the BigCommerce app store are the variety of apps offered, the ease with which apps integrate for nontechnical people like myself and the results we get from using the apps. One important app we use is Signifyd, which focuses on fraud relief. We were using a rules-based system prior to Signifyd on the Magento site, and it was only approving about 96% of our orders. We talked to the Signifyd team in detail about how their AI platform works with BigCommerce, and were able to work out a proof of concept with them that they exceeded in terms of performance. They're approving about 99.8% of our orders right now, which is a huge improvement for us.

Additionally, we use Addrexx for address verification and form field auto-completion, an important feature we were missing from our previous site. Without address verification and form-field auto-completion, we were experiencing high fallout of consumers in the cart and checkout process. Now, with Addrexx, a customer comes to our website and can input the most archaean addresses and Addrexx will auto complete their entry and offer up error messages if something doesn’t look right, giving them a chance to fix it. It satisfies the customer by making it easier to fill out the form, and it satisfies us by letting customers go through the checkout process more quickly and easily. We’ve also saved a fair amount of money by shipping packages to the right addresses, whereas before we were getting a lot of returns due to incorrect addresses. It's a win-win all the way around.

One of the most exciting apps that we recently launched is Klaviyo, our new email platform. Overdose managed the transition from our old platform and did it quickly and efficiently. We are so psyched to make the move from our old email provider for a million different reasons, but the biggest is the way Klaviyo plugs into the BigCommerce store and uses customer data in a way that gives us so much more data and control over building segments and lists., and using actual customer behavior that we just didn't have before. We've always been a “batch-and-blast” email campaigner, and now we've been able to start to slice and dice our file and figure out how to send emails to the right people. One of the first emails we sent on Klaviyo had a 50% open rate and 10% click through rate. I've never seen numbers like that before, and we are just getting started. We set up our email flows for automated emails really quickly, opening up a whole new world of opportunity for us in the way we communicate with our customers.