By the time you’re reading this, some of you may have stumbled across our recently launched gear store. For those of you who haven’t, I invite you to check it out at www.shop.huntinfool.com and provide us with feedback on the layout, shopping experience, product selection, and anything else you’d like to share. Of course, I’d also encourage you to do some shopping if you’re so inclined.
For the most part, the Huntin’ Fool website has sold branded gear and a few other items, so this is our first foray into providing a selection of gear that we believe makes hunts more successful, if for no other reason than being more comfortable in the woods. This effort has been made possible through a partnership with my good friends, Cody and Koliss Carr, who own and manage their own outdoor store, Outfitter Gear List. They will be providing inventory, shipping, and warehouse support on the majority of products we carry on our site at this time. Outside of that relationship, the two sites are completely independent of each other in every way.
Like everything we do, it was important to our team to do it right. To us, that means providing competitive pricing on a selection of some of the best gear that we personally rely on for our hunts. Perhaps more importantly, doing it right meant improving the search and shopping experience. As a team, we’re all tired of searching websites with very specific terms only to have results returned that did not match what we asked to see. As we planned the website architecture for our store, we spent a lot of energy around the concept of telling the truth to our shoppers, rather than trying to show and sell them a product that wasn’t properly related to the products they are looking for. We know this will probably cost us some sales, but we also know that those of you who choose to shop with us will appreciate the fact that we respect your time and won’t waste it by trying to sell you something you’re not looking for.
In my opinion, there is a long-standing stereotype around pushy salespersons for legitimate reasons. As e-commerce technology has evolved, too many platforms have implemented pushy sales techniques that are backed by technology that doesn’t really care about the shopper. With that in mind, we built a platform that won’t try to show you a boot you should buy when you’re looking for a knife.
Furthermore, we won’t try to sell you a Crispi boot if you are looking for a Kenetrek and vice versa. Sure, we’ll show related items that we have available, but if you type Outdoor Edge and we don’t have any in stock, we’ll tell you that right up front versus throwing other knife brands in front of you in an attempt to change your mind.
Whether you are searching for brands, products, categories, product types, product variants, etc., it’s our commitment to you that we’ll respect your time and let you move to another store if we don’t have it in stock. If anything, that will inspire us to expand our product selection beyond the brands and products we personally trust and use to include the brands and products that each of you trust and use.
In fact, we plan to rely on member reviews, endorsements, recommendations, and more as our store develops over time. To the extent possible, we intend our store to be an extension of all of the things that we do now where we combine our own experience with a network of our Huntin’ Fool members who conservatively spend more than a quarter million days in the field each year as a group. We’ll also rely on our trusted outfitters, whose opinions are invaluable when it comes to vetting out the best gear on the planet. The bottom line is that we are committed to providing great gear at great prices on a platform that strives to respect our members’ time.
Having said that, we realize that our store is a work in progress that will get better with time and we welcome your feedback to help us make it better. In that regard, our commitment to you is that you’ll see constant change in the look, feel, and functionality of the store, and we trust that much of the change will be inspired by you. I also want to assure you that we’ve spent a lot of time taking steps to ensure that the store contributes to our mission of equipping our members to go on more hunts with better information, which means that we can’t, and won’t, lose focus on the core responsibilities we have for our members here at Huntin’ Fool.
In closing, it’s my hope that our store provides additional value to our members as well as my Huntin’ Fool teammates. We all love great gear, and as we find new and better ways to thrive in the woods, we’re excited to share them on a platform that we get the privilege of managing. In the months to come, be on the lookout for updates to the name of the store, the look and feel, product videos, and more. For those who choose to shop with us, thanks in advance. We look forward to supporting your purchases!
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