Dynamo Retail Group is fueling people’s passion for biking and, through its extensive network of franchisees, supplying bicycling enthusiasts across Western Europe with the vehicles, accessories and services they need.

With affiliates that have provided Dutch and German cyclists with gears and gear for up to a century — and in one case, even longer — the company boasts one of the fastest-growing retail networks in the European two-wheeler sector. Headquartered in Amersfoort, Netherlands, and formed through a 2014 merger, it now supports more than 840 stores across the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

Operating at the intersection of B2C and B2B channels, Dynamo strives to provide the high-touch customer experience that drives consumers to its affiliate bicycle specialty stores, while equipping those retail entrepreneurs with procurement, back office and marketing support.

This creates a unique scenario for the Dutch retail platform’s ecommerce group, where the digital presence primarily exists to drive brick-and-mortar traffic.

“Our main conversion is sending people to the store,” says Sander de Waal, Product Owner at Dynamo Retail Group. “The goal of the web shop isn’t selling bikes online but getting people to the store — to feel, fit, test and choose the right bike and to have a service experience with their local specialist.”

The challenge

Getting consumers to kick the tires

Dynamo is seeing a shift in its customer base: traditionally composed of older cyclists, it has grown to include a younger, more search-savvy cohort and young families needing everything from cargo bikes to transport the kids to school to e-bikes for weekend activities. Maintenance and service — which happens at their local bike shop — remain essential, making it crucial for the company to build and sustain those connections, regardless of the channel.

“Customers have a lot of personal contact with the store, and it’s important that it’s close to where they live,” de Waal says. Ironically, as bicycles have evolved to include more electronics, sensors and digital features, the need to physically connect with specialists has only grown. Most Bike Totaal customers live within 3 kilometers (just under 2 miles) of their retail location. 

The company took advantage of a replatforming initiative to improve its search and discovery experience. “The website was a bit old school, and we combined a few different brands into one. We needed a new website, a new web shop and ecommerce platform. One of the most important topics was a new search engine,” de Waal says.

The company’s existing Elasticsearch-based search engine was undermining the customer experience through slow performance and weak relevance. In addition, on the back end, its complexity meant the Dynamo team required external developers to make even small changes.

“We couldn’t provide relevant search results,” he adds. “When someone searched for a black bike, the first thing they’d see was a black bag, then maybe a black lock — if it was even black! It could take a few results before it even showed a bike.”

“Search had to be faster, easier, relevant and future proof. We were really missing the basics.”

The solution

Shifting gears with Algolia Search solutions

Dynamo partnered with its ecommerce specialist KEGA to investigate competitive search solutions, ultimately choosing Algolia because it met their requirements and offered the most advanced functionality.

“At first it’s pretty scary because there’s so much to it, but once you get into Algolia, you notice it’s the more advanced solution,” de Waal says. “And then it absolutely becomes easy to work with.”

In just three months, Dynamo and KEGA implemented Algolia Search, Dynamic Re-ranking, Categories, Rules, Merchandising Studio, Analytics, Dynamic Synonyms and A/B Testing. To align with its goal of helping to drive business to local bike shops, Dynamo created an index of its affiliates in Algolia. “If a customer wants to book a test ride, they can select the store — and all of it happens through Algolia,” he says. “Even in checkout, data is retrieved from Algolia. It’s all part of a composable commerce setup we’ve created.”

Data is pushed to Algolia via APIs from Alumio’s low-code integration platform, then retrieved and rendered in Storyblok’s headless CMS, giving Dynamo full control over indexing and display. “It works perfectly,” de Waal says.

Beyond delivering the speed, performance and relevance the company needed to optimize customer experience, Dynamo is using Algolia to help respond to an emerging business challenge: the growth in popularity of FatBikes — low-cost, electric bikes that are especially popular with young riders.

“Thanks to Algolia, we noticed a rise in search queries containing ‘fat bike.’ We don’t sell them, but now at least we can redirect customers to a page that shows them alternatives.”

The result

Rubber hits road with relevance that clicks

With their search experience fully torqued by Algolia, Dynamo is seeing significant benefits, especially in its mission to draw customers to its affiliate stores.

Their new, faster, more relevant search experience is helping build loyalty that — with an expensive and personal product like a bicycle — de Waal suggests is better built in person.

“Algolia is helping us overcome our biggest obstacle: convincing customers that the best way to buy their bike is in a store and not online,” de Waal says. “There they can talk to a local specialist, learn about the materials, try different bikes, and really fall in love with the product.”

Dynamo has seen improvement in several KPIs since its Algolia implementation, including:

• An increase in search use

• More accurate search results

• Greater click-through rates

• Higher conversions from search

“People who use the search bar on a category page are more likely to convert than those that don’t,” de Waal notes. “That says a lot about how important Algolia is for people in their journey to find and eventually test a product.”

Feedback from customers and, significantly, store owners has been overwhelmingly positive. “The most value might come from the lack of criticism from our stores. In the past those owners were sometimes angry because search wasn’t working,” de Waal admits. 

“Now, even if we have an issue, it can be fixed in minutes, and any problems solved,” he continues. “We now get positive feedback. It’s awesome.”

He says that thanks to Algolia, Dynamo can manage all the aspects of search and discovery itself, without outside intervention, giving the ecommerce team the freedom to make last-minute changes. Importantly, they can direct customers to specific products or make certain brands more present, while maintaining relevance.

In keeping with Algolia’s ease of use and cross-functional flexibility, Visual Merchandising is perhaps what de Waal appreciates most from the solution: “We can immediately see what we’re doing — an exact copy of our category page — and how it responds when we add rules or push products. It's a nice feature. It makes things easier because you see it live, not just a bunch of code and text, hoping that the results will be OK.”