Bass Pro Shops gains from new thinking about an old idea

New thinking about an old idea is making a difference at BassProShops.com this year as the outdoors hobby gear supplier has built site enhancements around the long-term value of community building among customers. “We have really been focused on putting the customer in the driver’s seat when they come to the site in how we expose our content,” says David Seifert, director of operations, direct marketing.

“People started talking about community back in the dot-com bomb era. It didn’t work because when people came to a site, retailers didn’t want to expose non-shopping content to visitors,” says Seifert. While other sites also have content for the outdoors enthusiast—though few have content as extensive as Bass Pro’s—“you really have to hunt for it,” he says.

In efforts to make customers see the value of coming to the site more frequently, BassProShops.com has made it easier for them to find content this year with a design that elevates its outdoors library. Information about the library now occupies a significant portion of the home page and is easily accessible from other pages as well. Bass Pro has also beefed up content further with the addition this year of customer reviews, and it maintains a number of heavily-used, topic-specific community forums easily accessible from the home page—at last count, its bass fishing forum had almost 170,000 posts.

“We have had the outdoor library in the past but we haven’t given the space on the site to expose it like we have this year,” says Seifert. “Letting the customer determine what they want to do on the site, as opposed to focusing exclusively on shopping, has been why our frequency of visits are up, and the conversion rate is up as the result of the community areas that have been our focus.”

Bass Pro Shops is No. 77 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites.