Craghoppers adds new US site

The Regatta Group is opening up a new site for its Craghoppers brand in the US as well as sites on both sides of the Atlantic for a new range of clothing backed by adventurer Bear Grylls.

The new sites, developed by ecommerce solutions specialist Salmon using its SAFE application framework, leverage IBM WebSphere Commerce and its extended sites functionality. This is designed to allow customers to launch new sites quickly and easily by reducing development time and spend as all the sites sit on one instance of the platform and the majority of the data and business logic is shared.

The new US stores replicate the UK stores but instead display the products with prices in dollars and allow US-oriented data capture of customer information at point of registration. The product description field has been changed to highlight that sizes are by UK size, although a US sizing translator is available within the product description.

All products are shipped from the UK by Royal Mail but, to make it as simple as possible for customers that aren’t satisfied with their goods to return them, they are returned to a central location in the US.

“The UK websites have been a contributing factor to our success during 2008 and 2009, we are seeing significant cost savings as a result of the new platform, as well as an increase in sales, and we were keen to replicate this in the US,” says Chris Bulmer, group IT director at Regatta. “We have been very impressed with how quickly and easily Salmon were able to bring our additional brands online. We are confident we made the right decision selecting Salmon’s ecommerce solution SAFE and the IBM WebSphere Commerce platform.”