Online outdoor retailer Backcountry is developing into the second largest live shopping player after market leader Woot!.
Since Summer of 2008, Backcountry has started up three additional live shopping branches:
- Last week Wednesday their sixth live shopping site Brociety went online – as a sort of winter version of Whiskey Militia. Whiskey Militia will serve the skater scene exclusively while Brociety focuses on snowboarders.
- Similarly, Backcountry also took the strategy with their biking division. Since the start of Bonktown middle of January, Chainlove specializes exclusively on mountain bike fans, whereas Bonktown takes care of the street riders.
- After the surprising success of the biking site Chainlove, early this year we should see another two bicycle sites launched (see the case study)
- Only last September did Backcountry convert one of its regular online shops to a pure live shopping site. Tramdock continues to orient itself on skiers – but only with one product at a time.
- For another perspective on Tramdock, see a post from Bob Lefsetz’s blog.
The live shopping strategy from Backcountry was a key theme of the third Exciting Commerce organized Live Shopping Days conference held in Berlin recently.
Backcountry had the experience that live shopping offshoots attract considerably more attention with die-hard fans as regular online shops do. Backcountry thus uses the ODAT (“one deal at a time”) format increasingly as a revenue driver for their regular sites such as Backcountry.com or Dogfunk.com.
Also in terms of revenue growth the QVC sister made massive leaps in the last three years, from revenues of $52 million in 2005 to a last reported $200 million.
Backcountry is currently looking for loads of new employees, amongst others several business analysts to fine tune the business.
Related posts:
- Backcountry Launches Chainlove, Its Third “One Deal at a Time” Site
- Why Backcountry is Expanding its Live Shopping Business
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.
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