For many retailers, peak season arrives with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday sales that follow. For Trek Bikes, some of its biggest moments happen in March and April, then in late August through early October, when new products are released weekly.
No matter what the calendar says, the challenge is similar. When demand accelerates, businesses need to keep pace. For Trek Bikes, that means speed across all aspects of the customer journey.
“During our peak seasons, we need speed,” says Royce Thigpen, head of Applications Development for Trek’s SAP Commerce Cloud platform. “We need to make sure that not only is our website stable, but our website is fast, our checkout process is fast, and our ability to get the products to the website from our downstream systems is also very fast.”
Keeping commerce moving when the market speeds up
The cycling market moves quickly. New products, technologies, competitors, and customer expectations continue to emerge. Trek serves individual consumers alongside a worldwide network of retailers and distributors, so each launch must work across a complex commercial landscape.
SAP Commerce Cloud makes it easier for Trek to support consumer and dealer storefronts on a single, reliable platform. Trek can reuse core product information while tailoring each experience to regional availability and customer needs. Localization and extensibility also help the company serve multiple markets without needing to build a separate commerce platform for every region.
With a stable commerce foundation in place, Trek can coordinate and validate the product information, marketing content, pricing, and search details needed for a successful launch. This support becomes especially valuable during busy periods, when Trek can release 10 or more products a month.
“Not only do we need to have our bikes performing, we need to have our platform performing as well,” Thigpen says.
Shifting readiness into high gear
Readiness also depends on how quickly teams can respond when something goes wrong. In the past, a commerce incident at Trek could pass through analysts, developers, business analysts, and quality assurance teams. A relatively straightforward issue could take a week or longer to reach production. Each handoff also pulled engineering time away from other development priorities.
Preventive support from SAP now helps surface potential issues earlier. Trek has added its own AI-driven automation to analyze those signals and support remediation. Developers review the proposed changes and remain accountable for what moves into production.
The results are substantial. Incident resolution that once took one to two weeks can now be completed within a day.Analysis for new SAP Commerce Cloud releases has moved from weeks to hours, and the development path is at least 10 times faster.
The shift also gives developers more room to innovate. Thigpen estimates that teams once spent about 25% of their time fixing bugs, but that share is now closer to 1% with the autonomous support pipeline, leaving more time to work on features that improve the customer experience.
A smooth ride on the bike—and online
Customers experience those improvements in a very simple way. The site works as expected, search responds quickly, checkout keeps moving, and product updates appear when shoppers and dealers need them.
Trek’s experience demonstrates that peak readiness goes beyond adding capacity for a seasonal traffic surge. A commerce foundation that adapts continuously, surfaces issues early, and supports faster decisions helps keep busy periods moving while giving teams more time to improve the shopping experience. The resilience, scale, and performance needed at peak are just as important throughout the year.
“One of the things that we pride ourselves on is a smooth ride, whether you’re on the bike or whether you’re on our website. The support we get from SAP Commerce Cloud means every day at Trek is a smooth ride.”
Royce Thigpen
Learn more
Learn how SAP Commerce Cloud helps organizations build scalable digital commerce experiences that keep moving when demand matters most, and learn why SAP is named as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce Platforms, remaining the only vendor consistently recognized 12 times since 2014.
Jin Oh is part of Commerce Product Marketing for SAP Customer Experience.
