Streamlining the path-to-purchase for exercise equipment, apparel, and accessories.
Bell developed the original Sling Shot in 2008 to train his chest while recovering from a torn pectoral muscle. Officially launched in 2010, the Sling Shot quickly became a key piece of equipment for gym rats and fitness newbies alike. Since then, MBSS has grown into a successful eCommerce business, launching additional pieces of equipment—like the popular Hip Circle—while also becoming a popular lifestyle brand. As MBSS continued to grow, stakeholders recognized its eCommerce website needed some work. While it was operating on the popular Shopify Plus platform, the site’s user experience (UX) was lacking. Enter Codal. Our team was proud to partner with an innovative brand like MBSS to help refine and improve its eCommerce presence.
Mark Bell Sling Shot (MBSS) is a cutting-edge fitness company that offers patented exercise equipment, apparel, and accessories. Founded by “meathead millionaire” Mark Bell, the brand strives to “empower those who seek to improve their life through fitness.” Its products are designed to offer superior performance and help people achieve their fitness goals more efficiently.
While MBSS offers truly inventive fitness products, its eCommerce site was cumbersome and difficult to navigate—so its paths-to-purchase and overall shopping experience needed to be streamlined. Plus, the MBSS site was seeing almost six times as many mobile users as desktop users, yet lacked a truly mobile-first design.
MBSS was employing the robust Shopify Plus platform, but it wasn’t taking full advantage of the platform’s best-in-class tools to deliver a seamless and engaging online shopping experience. MBSS had innovative products, compelling branding, and the power of a premier eCommerce platform. It just needed help delivering a cutting-edge experience that would drive customer engagement, conversions, and sales.
Codal began by conducting a full-scale eCommerce audit of MBSS’ website. Analyzing everything from the site’s homepage, to its product categorization, to the checkout process, our team determined key areas for improvement to help streamline the customer journey.
By putting the entire site under a microscope, then comparing it to fitness eCommerce industry standards, trends, and best practices, we were able to identify key areas where MBSS could improve how customers engage with and move through the site.
Based on the eCommerce audit, our team isolated multiple improvements. A key principle became making it as easy as possible for customers to access the products that are most relevant to their wants, needs, and interests. This could be achieved through several modifications, such as implementing more thematic paths to products and category pages, and making search and filtering more robust to allow for more users to easily access products and content.
Codal executed these changes by migrating the MBSS site to Shopify Plus’ Impulse theme, which offers key functionality that improves site navigability. This includes the ability to display menu lists on the site’s homepage, create collection sub-listings, and create custom filters and tags to help customers easily browse for and locate products. The Impulse theme also provided a perfect foundation for Codal to implement custom designs.
In addition to these UX improvements, Codal helped MBSS implement key plugins to improve its marketing efforts, including Shogun, Yotpo, and Klaviyo. Our team also launched an international version of the MBSS site—complete with automatic currency exchange and translation functionality—to cater to users outside of North America, and ultimately extend the brand’s international reach.
Codal’s optimization of MBSS’ online store resulted in a more seamless and engaging eCommerce presence that drives engagement, conversions, and sales.
Thanks to some crucial UX changes—namely those specific to the Shopify Plus Impulse theme—MBSS’ eCommerce site delivers a superior online shopping experience worthy of its quality fitness and lifestyle products.
In a testament to Codal’s status as a trusted MBSS partner, Codal continues working on the site, optimizing and building out new features and functionality to enhance the customer experience across devices.
