A total digital mobile commerce transformation
Big Bus Tours is the largest operator of premium, open-top sightseeing tours in the world. Founded in 1971 as a family business, the company provides “hop on, hop off” bus tours in 19 cities across four continents. In 2015, they were acquired by Exponent Private Equity, and embarked upon a journey of total digital transformation with mobile commerce in mind.
Their goal? To centralize their global e-commerce operations into one omnichannel experience and expand from the bus ticket industry into the lucrative attractions market, offering experiences like Madame Tussauds and the Empire State Building. But their legacy .Net platform was holding them back.
For a business with no physical products or fulfillment needs, the Big Bus Tours operation was complicated: On any given bus there can be customers from 60 different countries, demanding multiple currencies and languages. They needed a new mobile friendly website with a responsive design that was content rich, yet lightning fast, even for mobile customers in a foreign city.
Creating a simple, powerful mobile commerce store
Big Bus Tours chose Born Group and Adobe Commerce to realize their mobile commerce vision. “Big Bus Tours needed to launch across 18 global sites, mobile friendly and on a fully responsive design, with huge amounts of content,” says Claudia Summers, of Born Group. “They also needed a platform that could handle B2C and B2B on an international scale.” The answer was simple, they would design and develop a fully responsive design site on Adobe Commerce. Furlong agreed: “Adobe Commerce has a powerful, simple UX that really works for us.”
Paulo Roseghini, the project manager at Born Group, says: “We simply customized Adobe Commerce templates. Adobe Commerce is a mature platform with built-in mobile commerce features, it allows more control on the whole code system, it was easy to upgrade.” Big Bus Tours decided to keep extensions to a minimum, keeping the site light on its feet. They did use Intilery to provide a single customer view tool, optimization, and A/B testing. “It was easy to layer in, with all the flexibility that Adobe Commerce delivers,” adds Furlong.
For Big Bus Tours, the Adobe Commerce template gave the company the power to adapt, fast. Now, when they acquire existing bus tour companies and their routes, they can create a new store view, populate the content, and go-live in hours rather than weeks. But the main selling point was the cost, says Furlong. “For a business of our scale, Adobe Commerce was the best e-commerce solution.”
