Earlier this year the outdoor gear specialist introduced so-called fall-through search at its site. The feature, built by WebSideStory at the company’s request, delivers searchers to other Backcountry sites when they’ve searched for an item Backcountry.com doesn’t carry but its other niche sites do.

Backcountry doesn’t cross-market across its sites because “we think there’s a lot of power in having separate brands,” says John Bresee, president. “On the other hand, when a customer is looking for something and we know that we have it, to not offer it to them is not good customer service.”

Fall-through search preserves the separate identities of the specialized niche sites while directing the customer to the site carrying the product. “It’s been a powerful revenue driver across all sites,” Bresee says.

Fall-through search “is a great idea, but it needs some work,” contends Maris Daugherty, senior consultant at J.C. Williams Group. She notes that it may confuse some customers because while they’re told they’re being forwarded to a different site, they still appear to be on Backcountry.com.

Backcountry in August also introduced the “Bottomless SaC” at its SteepandCheap.com site, where bargain hunters can get deeply discounted prices on “killer gear.” Originally, Backcountry posted one deal at midnight each day, “but the site was getting so much traffic that we were selling out at 1 a.m.,” Bresee says. “We had 23 hours of dead air some days.”

Now, a new item is posted on the site as soon as another deal sells out. “When we went to the Bottomless SaC, our traffic and revenue doubled without any advertising,” Bresee says.

Buoyed by the success of the Bottomless SaC, Backcountry in October introduced a desktop alert system that notifies customers when a new deal has been posted on SteepandCheap.com. “We’ve just had tens of thousands of people downloading that,” Bresee says. “It paid for itself the first day.”