How SOG Knives Boosted Ecommerce Performance with BigCommerce

Reinventing SOG Knives Ecommerce with BigCommerce

SOG Specialty Knives, born from a passion for precision cutting tools in 1986, earned a loyal following among military, first responders and outdoor enthusiasts. By 2019 the knife maker realized their Magento 1 platform was failing them: sluggish load times, clunky navigation and a broken mobile experience were costing sales and brand trust. Director of Ecommerce Steve Miller stepped in to find a faster, more flexible solution.

Average page load clocks at 13 seconds on Magento had become a major conversion killer—every extra tenth of a second cost potential customers. Mobile checkout, a critical channel for outdoor shoppers on the trail, was nearly unusable, dragging conversion below 0.2%. With customers abandoning carts due to missing address verification and no form auto-complete, SOG’s site was unshoppable.

After vetting enterprise and entry-level solutions, SOG and its agency partner Overdose landed on BigCommerce. The SaaS platform offered hosted infrastructure, PCI compliance, regular security updates, and an extensive app marketplace. Pairing BigCommerce with Contentful CMS unlocked a unified content strategy and fueled a brand relaunch that could captivate and educate visitors with ease.

Strategic app integrations filled the remaining gaps: Signifyd’s AI-powered fraud protection improved order approval rates from 96% to 99.8%, while Addrexx provided address verification and form auto-complete, reducing cart abandonment and shipping errors. Overdose also deployed Klaviyo, transforming SOG’s email marketing from batch-and-blast to highly segmented flows with open rates hitting 50% and click rates at 10%.

Post-launch metrics tell the triumph story: revenue jumped 3.2×, overall conversion climbed 184%, and mobile revenue surged 4.5×. Even amid a global pandemic, SOG kept new brand releases rolling, leveraging BigCommerce’s flexibility to optimize campaigns, refine UX, and build on momentum. This case provides a roadmap for growing direct-to-consumer channels with speed, efficacy and measurable growth.