We made it easier to be choosier.
Have you ever found something online, taken the plunge and bought it, only to find once it’s in your hands it’s not what you were expecting at all?
Not surprising! It’s hard enough to choose clothes online, since you can’t touch and feel the fabrics, or see how a print or style looks and feels on your body rather than on a model’s. When you add in all the complexities of specialized athletic apparel or equipment, it can be quite a challenge to choose the right cycling gear.
It’s important to get it right, and not just to avoid dealing with returns. Choosing gear that’s well suited to the activity you are doing is a big part of enjoying it – when it’s the wrong thing, or it doesn’t fit you properly, it can really ruin your ride.
That’s why we’re always looking for ways to make it easier for you to find exactly the right gear for the riding you will do, and get the right fit for your needs.
We recently added new features on our website to help you narrow down the options to the ones that will work best for you. Now you can see much more easily what colors are available when there is a choice, and filter down our extensive array of cycling bottoms by the product attributes that matter most to you.
Let’s take a closer look:
All the cycling bottoms categories on our site now feature a set of filtering tools, located just above the listed items. A row of tabs lets you expand several groups of attributes – each one can be shown or hidden so you can work with just the filters you want.
Using the buttons in each section, you can filter down to the subcategories of shorts, knickers, tights and capris, and combine selections for features like leg length, rise, compression and more. The controls available will be a little different depending on the category you’re in. Whenever you select or deselect a button the items displayed are updated immediately.
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Let’s say you wanted to find loose fitting shorts with a long leg, available in size large. On the On Sale > Cycling Bottoms page we select four filters, and find two items on sale at the moment. On the current Cycling Bottoms category page there are four matching items.
What if you only wanted to see items made in the USA? One more button and we arrive at the Liberty Short. Done.
You can also filter by the chamois, so if you have a favorite or a recommendation from customer service you can quickly find all the cycling bottoms that have the type of chamois you need.
One thing to note is that this filter works on the items on the page you are currently viewing only. It doesn’t pull in items that match from other categories, so you may still need to look at both the current and on sale categories to see all your choices, depending on what you are looking for.
Shop By Size and Color Too
The size filter is available on all categories across the site where items are offered in a choice of sizes. It improves on the previous Shop By Size feature with smoother operation and updating.
Also appearing across the site you will notice thumbnails under the larger display images in all category views. These thumbnails indicate when other colors are available – rolling over the thumbnails, or tapping the thumbnail on your phone, gives you a preview of the other colors without clicking through to the item page. For the Cycling Tops categories, where prints and patterns are a big part of the decision, the thumbnail becomes a swatch, showing a closer view of the print choices currently available.
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Saddle Selection Made Easy
Earlier this year we unveiled our Saddle Selector, which distills the expertise of our customer service team into a unique web page. Answer a short series of questions about how you ride, and you see just the saddles that exactly match your requirements. You can then sort by your priority for low price, lowest weight, or premium choice, to get a personal recommendation for your ideal bike saddle.
There is a FAQ section on the page to give you a little extra information, but the questions are fairly self-explanatory. Like the bottoms filter, the Saddle Selector updates the matching items immediately, so you can narrow down your selection with just one or two buttons, depending on what you are looking for. For example you could see all the saddles we recommend for women on mountain bikes, or all the saddles we recommend for long rides several days a week.
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We hope it’s now a lot quicker and easier for you to choose the right cycling gear – let us know how these new features work for you:
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