Your customers research kit for weeks. Your site is built for people who buy in four minutes.
Ecommerce performance for outdoor, endurance and technical kit brands on Shopify. I spent five years running ecommerce at inov-8, and I have been running ultras for over a decade, so I already know what your customer is trying to find out before they commit two hundred pounds to a pair of shoes.
Five years at inov-8, where I traded the first million pound month and opened fifty-six countries. Ten years owning ecommerce profit and loss. One Spine Race finish, which is mostly relevant because it is why I read your product pages the way your customers do.
Four things generalists get wrong about this category.
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The research window is weeks, not minutes
Your customer reads reviews, watches a video, asks a forum, and comes back four times before buying. A funnel measured on last click and a product page built for impulse will both misread that completely, and the conclusions drawn from them will be wrong in the same direction.
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Fit and spec confidence decides most of it
Drop, stack, last width, waterproofing, pack volume, temperature rating. Get that information architecture right and conversion and returns both move, which is rare enough to be worth saying. Most brands bury it in a tab nobody opens on a phone.
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Your customers trust people, not brands
Reviews from somebody doing the same thing at the same level beat any amount of brand copy. Those reviews are now also the raw material the AI assistants use when somebody asks which shoe to buy for a hundred miler, which makes them a search asset rather than a nice to have.
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Seasonality here is a cliff, not a curve
Race calendars, weather and kit replacement cycles mean the window to fix anything is narrow and missing it costs a season. I have traded through it rather than read about it, and it changes what I would put first.
Where I would start on your store.
The product page. Spec, fit, comparison and use case restructured around how somebody actually decides. Usually the single largest available gain in this category, and the one that also reduces returns.
Being found during the research, not after it. Content and structured data that earns the comparison searches and gets you named when somebody asks an assistant what to buy. Most brands in this category are invisible there, which makes it cheap to win right now.
The second purchase. Kit wears out on a schedule you can predict from the first order. Almost nobody in outdoor does anything with that, and it is the cheapest revenue available to you.
£1m
inov-8's first net trading month at that level, and I led the trading that delivered it.
I also implemented Global-E to open fifty-six countries with dedicated storefronts in Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark and Sweden, played a key part in the move to a headless architecture, and ran ecommerce delivery for the most successful product launch the company had had. Five years in exactly your category, on exactly your problems, with my name against the number.
The full track recordTell me what is not moving and I will tell you where I would look.
Twenty minutes, no deck, no discovery process. If your problem is not one I can help with, I will say so on the call.