Magento Website Profile: How Helly Hansen Uses Magento

Adobe Commerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the planet.

And while we’ve covered its many impressive features before, maybe some of the most compelling evidence is simply how many successful eCommerce companies depend on Adobe Commerce to reach their ambitious goals.

We recently showed this with a post on how Wilson Sporting Goods uses Adobe Commerce to offer a user-friendly, high-converting online experience.

In this post, we’re going to talk about how popular outdoor clothing company Helly Hansen makes the most of what Adobe Commerce has to offer to conquer their eCommerce market.

(Note: Adobe Commerce was previously known as  Magento Commerce, but Adobe purchased Magento five years ago and has been rebranding the platform ever since)

Helly Hansen is a renowned Norwegian company that has built this enviable reputation by manufacturing high-performance outdoor gear and apparel that holds up against the elements and looks amazing at the same time.

And while it’s legacy dates all the way back to 1877, Helly Hansen uses the latest technology to create incredible products.

It took the same approach to its website by relying on Adobe Commerce in these six important ways.

Helly Hansen is an international company, which means they have two websites as far as their website goes:

1) They can create one storefront in one language and hope their customers all understand the one language it’s written in.

2) They can use an eCommerce platform like Adobe Commerce to create multiple storefronts, one for each country they want to target for online sales.

Obviously, Helly Hansen went with the second option.

So, if someone from the US is in the market for an amazing winter coat, they get a site written in American English…

https://www.hellyhansen.com/en_us/

If the customer is in Spain and wants a new pair of sailing pants, they’ll have no problem navigating a site in their native language…

https://www.hellyhansen.com/es_es/

And if somebody in Germany needs an incredibly pair of rain boots, they’ll feel right at home clicking around a site that is auf Deutsch geschrieben.

https://www.hellyhansen.com/de_de 

Just like Wilson uses Adobe Commerce to create multiple different stores they can run from one dashboard, Helly Hansen takes the same approach to serve multiple national markets. They don’t have to pay for completely different sites with completely different URLs with different backends to manage for each platform.

While there are multiple ways to serve numerous international markets, we highly suggest you use a subdirectory structure like Helly Hansen does to make it as easy as possible for Google to understand which version of your site to show its users based on where they’re based.

And sing “en_us” like Helly Hansen tells Google not just the country but the language of your site, too. This is important if you’re serving markets like Canada where people speak two different languages in the same country.

But there are sine other important steps you should take, as well. If you need help, feel free to contact us.

Helly Hansen has an absolutely beautiful-looking website.

And their category pages are perfect examples of this.

While they don’t have a traditional navigation bar on the left like we usually see with most Adobe Commerce sites, their category pages still have all the attributes and filters that customers need to quickly find the products they want as efficiently as possible.

In Helly Hansen’s case, you can tell they really know their customer’s buyer’s journey. They don’t just have their products organized by color, gender, and size. Helly Hansen also uses Adobe Commerce to pick a more specific filter, Activity, so their customers can search for products based on their preferred activity.

These kinds of user-friendly filters are one of the many important things that Adobe Commerce does especially well.

That’s also why this platform has become so popular with companies that have thousands of products. Without effective category pages that are easy to navigate, these eCommerce businesses would leave A LOT of money on the table.

But Adobe Commerce also ensures that their eCommerce product pages don’t drop the ball.

As you can see on Helly Hansen’s website, these pages are optimized to provide shoppers with anything they could possibly want to know in order to convert.

From product reviews to features to color swatches and those all-important product reviews, everything customers could possibly look for is right there.

While having thousands and thousands of positive reviews is certainly impressive, Helly Hansen knows that many customers need specific assurances before they purchase. Unless they see other customers address them, they’re not going to feel comfortable spending money.

They’ll probably leave the site to go find the kind of information they want, but what happens if they never show return?

To overcome this problem, Helly Hansen uses Yotpo to let users search their reviews by important keywords.

For example, in the example below, a customer is searching the reviews to get an idea for how comfortable this jacket really is.

This is an incredibly powerful way to keep customers on your website and in buying mode, so they eventually convert.

And that’s why we use Yotpo on every single eCommerce website we build.

But Helly Hansen takes things even further by giving customers the option to submit their measurements to get a size recommendation for each item of clothing on their website.

You can see an example of this in our above video.

Plus, as we just covered, Helly Hansen also makes it easy for customers to search review by size-related information, so that they can see what other shoppers have had to say about similar size recommendations.

Category and product pages that are easy to navigate are both essential.

But you probably also know that a lot of shoppers are still going to be impatient.

No matter where they show up on your eCommerce website, their expectation will be that they’ll be able to find their products within seconds (thanks, Amazon!).

Helly Hansen has met this challenge by powering their Adobe Commerce site’s internal search with Klevu – one of our favorite eCommerce extensions.

Just by clicking on their search bar, you get suggestions:

But the moment you start inputting a query, Helly Hansen’s search feature takes over with recommendations:

So, even if a customer only has some general idea of what they’re looking for on Helly Hansen, their powerful eCommerce site search shows them all kinds of products that might grab their interest (and drive greater average order values).

Just like the rest of their Adobe Commerce website, there’s a lot to love about Helly Hansen’s checkout page.

It starts with their chart, which hovers no matter where you scroll on the product page. So, the exact moment a customer is ready to check out, they’re only a click away. This is especially helpful for mobile shoppers.

The checkout page includes some important purchase motivators like their return policy, shipping information, and even the option to change the customer’s country if they want.

But if it was up to us, we’d run this important page off of a premium checkout solution like Bolt or the one we designed for eCommerce companies, Dominate checkout.

Built in partnership with PayPal, our checkout solution works seamlessly with Adobe Commerce and payment solutions like Venmo, Braintree, Google Pay, AmazonPay, and many more.

Plus, it’s completely free.

We don’t even charge transaction fees.

Check out Dominate for yourself to see everything this powerful checkout tool has to offer.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are web applications that combine the best features of both websites and native mobile apps, offering a seamless user experience across different platforms.

Among other things, PWAs are easy to index for Google and other search engines, ensuring better discoverability and visibility for eCommerce businesses like Helly Hansen. They can work on any device or operating system, including Adobe Commerce.

Helly Hansen uses their PWA site to provide an app-like experience to shoppers without requiring them to download or install anything, eliminating the friction of traditional app stores. This kind of ease-of-access makes for increased engagement rates and conversions.

Finally, Helly Hansen doesn’t rely too heavily on their blogs to bring in traffic.

This isn’t that surprising given how many of the company’s keywords are brand-related, which is more than enough to give them impressive traffic numbers.

That said, they do regularly post fantastic content about the clothing technology they use, news related to outdoor activities (i.e., skiing, sailing, etc.), and much more.

While Helly Hansen uses this content to drive engagement on their social media pages (and probably on their email list, too), the company also gets some great backlinks from this content.

So, they’re doing a great job of creating content that their customers love, but that other sites love linking to, as well.

Contact us to speak with one of our Adobe Commerce experts and get a consultation that shows you just what this amazing eCommerce platform can do for your website. We can help you understand what a Magento site would cost for your company and the price of migrating your site to Magento.