Mountain Warehouse transitions to composable e-commerce site
A U.K.-based global outdoor clothing and equipment retailer is partnering with an e-commerce platform to enable more flexible digital retail operations.
Mountain Warehouse has launched a new composable ecommerce-based e-commerce store based on the BigCommerce platform. The new composable architecture, which enables the retailer to select and integrate solutions from different vendors to create a modifiable, tailored environment, replaces a decades-old custom-built system.
Founded in 1997, Mountain Warehouse operates more than 400 stores worldwide across markets including the U.K., U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The company designs and produces the majority of its products in-house, and its previous e-commerce platform had become increasingly difficult to scale with significant development resources required to maintain and support aging infrastructure.
Mountain Warehouse also faced limitations around speed-to-market, security and the ability to pilot newer tech solutions. In response, the retailer has now adopted a composable technology stack, including BigCommerce as the core commerce engine and the BigCommerce Catalyst e-commerce front-end deployed on Vercel, as well as Contentful for content management, Algolia for search and personalization, and Dotdigital for marketing automation.
The retailer also leverages Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay to accept digital payments. This architecture enables Mountain Warehouse to adopt a best-of-breed approach while integrating custom middleware to manage inventory, pricing, customer data and shipping.
By adopting a composable, headless architecture built on BigCommerce, Mountain Warehouse says it can now accelerate time-to-market for new features and initiatives, reduce reliance on maintaining custom core systems, improve platform security, reliability and compliance and enable flexible integration with third-party and in-house solutions.
“Moving away from our legacy platform was critical to unlocking the next phase of Mountain Warehouse’s growth,” said Simon Neale, CTO at Mountain Warehouse. “With BigCommerce, we now have the flexibility to innovate faster, integrate best-of-breed technologies and focus our engineering efforts on delivering better customer experiences rather than maintaining core infrastructure.”
The implementation included several capabilities tailored to Mountain Warehouse’s business model, including a custom checkout experience supporting gift cards and multiple payment methods, multi-location inventory management and click-and-collect functionality, complex order handling, including split shipments and marketplace workflows, address lookup and validation integrations, and support for bundled products and digital gift cards.
[READ MORE: U.K.’s Mountain Warehouse to acquire Eastern Mountain Warehouse for $10 million]
“Mountain Warehouse’s launch demonstrates how enterprise retailers can move beyond the limitations of legacy systems,” said Andrew Norman, senior VP and GM of international, BigCommerce. “With a composable foundation, they’re able to innovate faster, scale globally and deliver more seamless customer experiences.”
