When Montana Silversmiths first began selling online in 2005, its ecommerce site was homegrown and static.

The buckles and jewelry retailer couldn’t apply multiple attributes to the products on its website, so it had to place each product in just one category, Lance Neirby, Montana Silversmiths CEO, told Digital Commerce 360.

The Montana Silversmiths ecommerce site “was pretty generic” for about six years, he said. And it didn’t have a live feed, meaning the employee tasked with updating the site at the time had to manually sort through inventory to display what the company actually had on hand to sell online. That employee would update the site once a day.

A few years before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Montana Silversmiths had moved its ecommerce site platform to Adobe Commerce, called Magento at the time. Now, about 10% of Montana Silversmiths sales comes from ecommerce, Neirby told Digital Commerce 360 — and the goal is to double that digital sales total.

Montana Silversmiths operates two brand stores in Montana and one in Missouri. About 75% of its sales come from wholesale, and about 15% come from events, Neirby said. Growing its ecommerce sales “always comes down to flow,” he said.

“We have to build out the infrastructure here in Columbus [Montana] to be able to keep up to that pace as well,” Neirby said. “So can we create that much product? Can we pack that much product? Can we ship that much product? Can UPS pick up that much product? It’s a whole analysis that we need to work on versus just trying to grow sales and not worry about anything else.”

How Montana Silversmiths is growing its ecommerce sales

Marshall Smith, vice president of marketing at Montana Silversmiths, told Digital Commerce 360 that because of the large breadth of products on the retailer’s website, he and his team are working “to make it very easy for the layman who doesn’t know our brand to get into our website and then get into the products they want to get into very quickly.”

75% to 80% of the retailer’s website traffic comes from mobile devices. However, its desktop conversion rate is about double that of mobile, he told Digital Commerce 360. Improving the mobile experience would make sales through the channel “low-hanging fruit,” he explained.

“It has more to do with our glitchy, laggy checkout process at times, so us streamlining that piece for the end user is what we’re really focused on,” Smith said. “We have all the NPS score stuff and reviews and most of it is positive, but when it is negative, it’s just like, ‘We love the product, we love it, but hey, we need to fix this piece of the user experience.'”

Montana Silversmiths also adds 100 product stock keeping units (SKUs) each quarter, Marshall said. That gives the retailer plenty to work with from a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint. Montana Silversmiths currently ranks first for “bolo tie” and highly for “money clip.”

Montana Silversmiths adds 100 new products to its ecommerce site each quarter.

Reaching new consumers via streaming services

This year, the Montana Silversmiths also began using StackAdapt, an advertising platform, to reach consumers on streaming platforms.

“When you’re watching Yellowstone or whatever you’re watching and you might not be familiar with the brand, but at least you’re familiar with the way of life or you’re inspired by it or whatnot, then you’ll get shown our brand and hopefully lead you into our product,” Smith said. “We’ve seen our organic search volume is at all-time highs in June and July.”

He added the retailer started using StackAdapt to reach outside its core audience and connect with “fringe, adjacent audiences.” The retailer identifies relevant audiences searching for cowboy, hunting or fishing products. It then A/B tests different commercials to see what works on different networks.

“It’s gotten us a ton of eyeballs, which is what we’re looking for. It wasn’t necessarily about making a conversion mechanism, at least this year,” Smith said. “It was more about bringing people to the brand, learning about our offering. So then hopefully as we’re up-leveling what we’re doing on ecom in 2025 — more of an ecom rebrand — then we can really capitalize and convert those folks.”

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