Offbeat Bikes is a niche bike shop based in Chicago, Illinois focused on cargo and electric bikes. Mandalyn Renicker, the current owner of Offbeat Bikes, bought the business from its founder and has been devoted to spreading the joy of biking throughout her community ever since.
Mandalyn at first used Square Retail POS for in-store payments and inventory, and she built an online store using Squarespace to let customers browse through available bikes and bike parts online. But the functional limitations and unreliable integration between Squarespace and Square Retail POS bloated administrative work for Mandalyn, and held her back from building the cohesive shopping experience she aspired to offer customers.
“We had a clunky online experience and inventory management was a nightmare,” says Mandalyn. “I was manually checking and updating inventory numbers all the time, which was really tedious and time-consuming. We needed to move everything to one integrated platform, and Shopify felt like the logical solution.”
With Shopify, Offbeat Bikes has:
- Enabled buy online pick up in store (BOPIS) functionality
- Increased year-over-year bike accessory sales by 400%
- Increased year-over-year kids’ bike sales by 100%
- Saved over four hours per month on inventory management
- Streamlined daily invoicing, saving multiple hours per week
The Challenge: Reducing friction between retail and ecommerce sales
Mandalyn was spending an exorbitant amount of time trying to account for inventory discrepancies between Offbeat Bikes’ website and its brick-and-mortar store. This, alongside other administrative headaches, were keeping her from devoting as much energy as she wanted toward growing the business helping customers find their perfect bike.
“I was piecing together a lot of software, and it wasn’t working out,” says Mandalyn. “I had to use a third-party software to sync inventories between the Squarespace website and Square POS, which was complicated to manage. Even then, I still had to manually count inventory levels because we kept running into errors on both systems.”
The fragmentation between Offbeat Bikes’ ecommerce and POS system led to accounting headaches as well. “I pay sales tax monthly, like most retailers,” says Mandalyn. ”It becomes a lot of extra work when you have payments coming in from multiple different places like we did. As a business owner, I’m doing the bulk of that work. The process needed to be streamlined.”
The online store’s user experience needed attention too. With the typical Offbeat Bikes customer spending ample time researching bikes online before visiting the shop, Mandalyn wanted the website to help customers easily compare options, research technical specifications, and view product availability. But the existing website was far from intuitive.
“Our website’s ecommerce functionality was limited,” says Mandalyn. “Navigating from product information pages to then find pricing or make a purchase wasn’t intuitive. Shoppers were getting lost in the flow.” To make matters worse, the product availability shoppers saw online didn’t update quickly when store transactions processed through Square POS. “If a bike or a certain part had just sold out at the shop, our online shoppers weren’t necessarily aware of that.” Mandalyn explains. “That led to us overselling items and having to manually cancel orders and issue refunds.
The whole experience was convoluted for our customers on the frontend and a pain to manage on the backend. We needed to switch to a platform that cut down admin work and helped us provide shoppers with a more cohesive, reliable experience online and in-store.
The Solution: Migrating ecommerce and POS system to Shopify
Mandalyn was determined to unify her ecommerce and POS systems using Shopify. She went about the migration process one step at a time. “I started with ecommerce,” says Mandalyn. “Shopify is very user friendly right out of the box, so I was able to set up my store and add products with no trouble. My husband is a product designer, and he was able to help me customize the theme to match the original Squarespace site. From there, we were off to the races.”
Once everything was moved over to Shopify, Offbeat Bikes was finally able to provide the cohesive, user-friendly online shopping experience Mandalyn had envisioned. “Shopify’s customizability has been so valuable,” says Mandalyn. “Not only do we now have beautiful landing pages nested within product collections that are super easy to navigate, but I can use native Shopify features like metafields to showcase important product information, which is really useful for our customers as they’re doing their research.”
Mandalyn noted that before Shopify, she was paying for at least 10 third-party apps for things like inventory syncing and ensuring a buy button was embedded on a product page. While she uses some third-party apps from the Shopify app ecosystem today—such as Preorder Wolf to let customers reserve bikes on backorder—she gets almost all the functionality she needs natively within Shopify. “All these things that were a headache to manage just kind of disappeared with the move to Shopify,” she says. “The Shopify interface is just easier to use too. Customers recognize it, especially at checkout where when they see that Shop Pay icon, they know checking out will be a breeze.”
After the ecommerce transition was complete, Mandalyn was ready to fully unify her business by migrating from Square Retail POS to Shopify POS. With approximately 350 SKUs and nearly 2,000 customer accounts needing to be migrated, Mandalyn had braced herself for a complicated transition. But the process ended up being much smoother than she expected.
“Getting started with Shopify POS was very user friendly, which really speaks to the strength of the technology,” says Mandalyn. “The support docs in The Shopify Help Center are very robust, and phone support was great with helping us get set up with our new hardware and starting to take advantage of the features we needed.”
Creating draft orders from the Shopify admin to invoice the shop’s service customers was just one of many native Shopify POS features that brought immediate value to the business. “On top of handling our product sales and managing inventory, Shopify POS is really the workhorse of our service center,” says Mandalyn. “We offer customers ongoing service and repairs, so that was really important. We create draft orders as custom orders through Shopify POS to invoice these customers and keep our records organized.”
Shopify makes the customer experience I want to offer customers possible, without burdening me with more admin work. It was easy to migrate, easy to learn, and makes running my business more straightforward than it used to be.
The Results: On the road to improved customer satisfaction
With Offbeat Bikes’ online and brick-and-mortar stores now managed through Shopify’s unified retail platform, the shop is operating more efficiently, and it’s fully integrated with the online store. Customers have the convenience of buying online and picking up in store after browsing through the product catalog from the comfort of their homes, and Mandalyn doesn’t need to worry about whether the item they purchased is out of stock. All these benefits have led to more sales as well as time, energy, and peace of mind.
“Accessory sales in March this year are up by about 400% as compared to last March,” says Mandalyn. “Kids bike sales alone have more than doubled. I attribute this growth to much better search functionality with Shopify and collections that show people exactly what they’re looking for.”
The amount of tedious work that Shopify has saved Mandalyn is significant as well. “I used to spend at least four hours manually counting inventory every month, and I always had to ensure our platforms were syncing up properly,” says Mandalyn. “I don’t have to do that anymore because Shopify’s inventory system is so robust and easy to manage. I’m flying through service invoicing at the end of each day faster than I ever could with Square too, which I think is because the Shopify interface is just a lot easier to use.”
After gaining back her time, Mandalyn can devote more of her energy into what matters most: delighting customers and growing the business.
Shopify allows me to do what I actually care about most, which is making sure my customers are having a great experience when they’re interacting with my shop in any way, whether that’s online or through social media or when they come by in person.
Results provided by Offbeat Bikes. Results may vary for every merchant.