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For 28 years, Premier Marine has designed and manufactured the best pontoon boats on the water. With 23% greater hull volume than competitors, Premier pontoons deliver top speed, maximum riding stability, and comfort, offering buyers the most luxurious and fully-customizable pontoon boats in the industry.
In preparation for peak boating season in 2021, Premier Marine asked CQL to deliver the most compelling online experience in the pontoon industry, featuring a fully redesigned website complete with a 3D Pontoon Boat Configurator, which allows customers to find the best boat for their needs, visualize and customize boat options with a pontoon configurator tool, and locate a dealer.
The new website set sail in less than 8 weeks, featuring a best-in-class user experience for customizing pontoons, a consolidation of websites onto Shopify, a redesign of the user experience and creative design, and an integrated 3D boat configurator and Premier’s OMS.
Site
Services
Commerce Strategy
Ecommerce Replatform
Experience & Design
Custom Development
Technology
Shopify
StitchLabs
ThreeKit
Under the direction of new senior management, Premier Marines needed an ecosystem that could be managed internally on one commerce platform. Premier had two sites, one on WordPress and one on WooCommerce, that failed to scale as the business grew and lacked the configuration tools that customers and dealers needed for designing custom pontoons. Premier, coming off of an agency’s failed custom replatform implementation, partnered with CQL for a full redesign, replatform, and configurator on one unified platform – in less than 2 months.
The selected platform needed to scale with new brands and customizations, support both dealers and customers with configurable pontoon boats built to order, to drive leads to the dealers for order completion, and to communicate a complex data set – product lines, floorplans brochures, accessories, and options – in a simple manner. In addition, Premier staff needed full control and flexibility in product information and website content management, to enable the online business to expand its direct to consumer (D2C) business traffic via digital marketing campaigns, channels, and search optimization.
Following strategic discovery meetings and audits with Premier, CQL recommended Shopify’s platform with an integration to ThreeKit‘s 3D Boat Configuration Tool. The custom boat configurator was showcased throughout the user journey, allowing shoppers to begin customization of a boat from any page of the website. The configurator requires shoppers to select their boat model, followed by selections for colors for the rail, bottom panel, top panel, flooring, seating base and accent, fiberglass and canvas. As color selections are made, shoppers can zoom in on the custom pontoon and rotate the view 360degrees in any direction, providing visibility into details as intricate as carpet patterns.
The new Shopify website would showcase Premier brand’s world-class reputation as the leader in pontoon boats, and feature optimized navigation and enhanced usability in the user shopping experience. CQL integrated Premier’s Shopify platform with Dealer Locator, Stocklist, and Stitch Labs (a third-party Order Management System (OMS)), to support backend ordering and shipping.
In less than 8 weeks, Premier Marine was sailing with a best-in-class user journey for building customized boats on Pontoons.com and finding a dealer to buy the pontoon of his/her dreams. Best yet, the staff at Premier are empowered to navigate the open waters of commerce ahead, with a site that was made for growth.
