This week we posted an interview with Tammie McKenzie from Cruiser Customizing. This was a very interesting interview. Cruiser Customizing started as community for for those who are passionate about cruiser riders. The members of the community were able to review and discuss the various accessories that are available. The ecommerce part of the business was added at a later stage – after the community was formed.
This is a contrast to a lot of ecommerce businesses that are primarily retailers who then try to create a community around their store – they add reviews, forums, blogs etc but they do all of that after they’ve created the store. At Cruiser Customizing they did it the other way round and it means they have a genuine, engaged community.
Cruiser Customizer operates a number of different sites to cater for different types of bikers who would normally not want to be associated with each other. There’s Realhog for the Harley Davidson parts and accessories, Goldwing Country for Honda Goldwing accessories, RideGear for Sport-bike accessories and Dollar Rider for discount accessories.
SLI has done quite a bit of customizing of our services for the Cruiser Customizing sites. While we run their site search like we do for most customers, for logged in users we preselect their make and model so someone who owns a Honda won’t see Harley specific products but we’ll still show products that are not make and model specific like clothing. We also have built a tire finder and a gift finder and are continuing to work on a number of other initiatives.
I’m sure you’ll find the interview with Tammie informative. For more you can follow Tammie (@karmahappens) and Cruiser Customizing (@CruiserCustom) on Twitter.
