Hunt Bike Wheels designs and sells carbon and alloy bike wheels for riders who care as much about marginal gains as its own engineers do. Founded in West Sussex, England, in 2015, the direct-to-consumer brand, owned by The Rider Firm, has since opened offices in Boulder, Colorado, and later in Dresden, Germany, to serve cyclists across the US and EU.
Hunt has run on Shopify since its earliest days. As the brand grew into new markets, it used Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, and Shopify checkout to give riders in each region fast, flexible ways to pay, without adding engineering overhead.
- Shop Pay drives 46% of Hunt’s online orders in the US and 19% in the UK.
- Shop Pay Installments lifts average order value in the US by 22%.
- New finance partners go live through Shopify checkout in as little as a couple of hours.
The challenge: flexible payments across three markets
As Hunt expanded from a UK startup into international offices, its riders’ expectations for how they wanted to pay diverged by market. Customers in different regions preferred localised payment options. Everyone expected a checkout experience that felt as considered as the wheels themselves.
Meeting those expectations market by market could easily have meant a new technical project for every finance partner and every region, work that a lean ecommerce team could not take on repeatedly. Hunt needed a foundation that let it add payment options quickly, rather than rebuild its checkout each time.
That foundation existed from the start. “Shopify was the first choice, and it’s only been proven to have been the right choice year after year,” said Dan Qarkaj, ecommerce trading manager at The Rider Firm. The founders picked Shopify because it was close to plug-and-play for a startup, letting the team launch fast and reach customers without a heavy technical lift, and that has held true as the business scaled into new countries and payment methods.
The solution: new payment partners live in hours
Shopify Payments has been Hunt’s core processor since day one, without a single major issue. That reliability freed the team to focus on adding payment options on top of it through Shopify checkout, rather than managing the plumbing underneath. Hunt brought on Novuna, an installment finance provider, in the UK. “The process was pretty straightforward integrating that with Shopify, and we’ve seen strong growth there because it lets customers pay in installments. We’ve seen a higher average order value, and it’s helped us reach new customers,” Qarkaj said.
We integrated with TrueMed, another finance partner, in the US. It was a couple of hours, and then we were up and running. Shopify checkout made that possible, and that was very helpful.
Hunt used the same checkout foundation to turn on Shop Pay Installments, which took no build at all, just a feature switched on.
The team has applied the same discipline to Shop, the app that lets Hunt sell wherever its customers already are. Over the past six to eight months, Hunt started actively maintaining its product listings and copy inside Shop. “It’s super easy to maintain because it feeds off of the same source as the website,” Qarkaj said. That groundwork let the team test Shop Campaigns as a new, low-effort sales channel.
Hunt has also moved to single-page checkout, enabling a better user journey, particularly on mobile, and is preparing to run its first A/B tests on checkout itself using Shopify Rollouts.
The result: higher order values, wider reach
Shop Pay now accounts for 46% of Hunt’s online orders in the US and 19% in the UK, making it one of the primary ways riders complete a purchase. Shop Pay Installments has been a meaningful part of that growth, letting customers spread the cost of a purchase.
The average order value through Shop Pay Installments is about 22% higher in the US.
The same discipline that made Shop easy to maintain is paying off as a sales channel. When Hunt experimented with Shop Campaigns, some customers messaged the brand directly to check if the listing was genuine: “We did have some customers reach out, like, ‘Hey, is this you guys? Am I okay to shop through, or do I do it through the website?’” That kind of question points to riders discovering and trusting the brand somewhere new, with no extra content work behind it.
Hunt has also spent the past year moving into a single global store on Shopify Markets. Consolidating onto one domain improved brand authority for search, and Shopify’s automatic location-based content removed the need to redirect customers between separate stores and domains. The team now manages its front and back end from one interface instead of juggling multiple themes and stores, and has cut the cost of running three separate stacks of third-party apps and services down to one. One gap remains: the current checkout does not yet let Hunt assign payment methods by entity, which is what stands between the team and bringing its US store fully into that single instance.
For now, the team is turning its attention to testing. “I have yet to try that, but that is a very, very great feature to have,” Qarkaj said of Shopify Rollouts, “because it wasn't there until just a few months ago.”