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Friday, May 12, 2023

Mecum Auctions Drives its Digital Experience Forward with Brand-New Website Built by Americaneagle.com

Americaneagle.com, a family-owned, global digital agency, is proud to announce the launch of a modern, scalable, and performant website for Mecum Auctions (www.mecum.com), built as a Headless WordPress platform. The significantly upgraded digital experience further confirms that Mecum Auctions are the ultimate destination for classic car enthusiasts.

Mecum Auctions is a world leader in collector car, motorcycle, and Road Art sales, hosting live auctions throughout the US. The company has been specializing in the sale of collector cars since the 1980s and offers approximately 20,000 lots per year, averaging more than one auction event each month.

Since its inception, Mecum has been event-driven, hosting large-scale live auctions complete with full production and television broadcasting. After the exceptional reception of its updated online remote bidding platform in 2020 and a full digital transformation of core business software, the auction house wanted to completely reimagine Mecum.com to integrate and support its next generation of growth.

Due to Americaneagle.com's reputation as a full-service agency and its ability to successfully craft a comprehensive in-house business solution, Mecum selected the company as its digital partner. Requirements for the new solution included the ability to automatically generate car lot pages, reduced time-to-market for engaging content creation, and unparalleled performance for end users.

"We're thrilled to unveil the new website, which represents a major milestone for Mecum Auctions," Americaneagle.com President Mike Svanascini said. "A culmination of hard work and cross-team collaboration, Mecum's new, fully integrated digital solution gives it the toolkit it needs to be successful now and far into the future. We're proud to have been a key partner in this project and are looking forward to Mecum's future successes."

A versatile headless digital solution decoupled the website's front-end delivery from Mecum's vast libraries of assets within the systems that store them. The website is powered by the WordPress content management system (CMS), providing second-to-none editing capabilities for Mecum's internal users. A design system was created within WordPress to efficiently utilize prestructured content blocks. Now, more than 50 predefined UI components deliver specific content, such as hero images, carousel promotions, calls-to-action, and more, to any designated page throughout the website, resulting in a significantly reduced time-to-market for new content and campaigns.

In addition to WordPress, Mecum's headless solution is powered by a combination of best-in-class tools to achieve unprecedented speed, performance, and scalability. They include the following:WordPress VIP – back-end infrastructure and hosting service that ensures Mecum's admin interface and GraphQL requests back to the database are as efficient as possible.
Salesforce – inventory management system, powered by Sales Cloud, that acts as a single source of truth. Salesforce event triggers are utilized to push data to a webhook within WordPress.
Vercel – front-end infrastructure that's distributed across Vercel's Edge Network, a content delivery network (CDN), resulting in ultra-fast response times.
Cloudinary – digital asset management (DAM) tool that houses and feeds an array of photo variations, from high-resolution print magazine files to transparent background versions, web images optimized for download speed, and more. It also enables photographers to upload images directly and marketers to edit, manipulate, and update images in real time.
Algolia – site search tool that provides near-instant results.

"After a long journey and a lot of hard work, we launched our new website, which illustrates another exceptional stride in Mecum's digital transformation," Mecum Auctions Director of IT Cade Cannon said. "Thanks to countless hours of work, Americaneagle.com was able to realize the vision we've had for this project since the beginning. The launch doesn't represent the finish line, but the start of Mecum using our web presence to better engage with our customers and empower our marketing team to supercharge their efforts as the company continues to grow at such a rapid pace.

"The feedback we've gotten so far has been nothing short of glowing," Cannon continued. "Customers, partners, and employees alike love how we've given the website a modern look and functionality, taking full advantage of the beautiful photography Mecum is known for while also maintaining enough similarities to the previous site that users are immediately comfortable navigating and finding their way around."

Other prominent features of Mecum's new website include content listings for upcoming auctions, a media section complete with news articles, podcast episodes, videos, and more, an auto transport functionality to easily schedule and transport cars to and from auction locations, and a financial services functionality, which allows collectors to apply for same-day approval. Additionally, customers are able to create member profiles via "MyMecum" functionality for access to an array of membership benefits, including a complete history of auction data to approximate the values of current offerings.

Mecum's website launched as planned and ahead of one of its biggest auctions of the year, Dana Mecum's 36th Original Spring Classic in Indianapolis, slated for May 12-20. Through its partnership with Americaneagle.com, Mecum's new digital experience leverages the power of cutting-edge technology, perfectly positioning it to deliver cohesive, intuitive, and inspiring user experiences to classic car enthusiasts across the country.

About Americaneagle.com

Americaneagle.com is a full-service, family-owned digital agency that has been dedicated to providing best-in-class web design, development, hosting, post-launch support, and digital marketing services for more than 25 years. With a global team comprised of 800+ skilled professionals and subject matter experts, Americaneagle.com focuses on achieving measurable results and exceeding goals for all of our clients. Thanks to our flexibility and expertise in a wide range of online services, we have the capabilities to handle businesses in any industry, from financial institutions to government entities, professional sports teams, manufacturing companies, healthcare organizations, large multi-channel retailers, and more.


About Mecum Auctions:

Nobody sells more than Mecum. Nobody. Mecum Auctions is the world leader in live collector cars, vintage and antique motorcycles, and Road Art sales, hosting auctions throughout the United States. The company has been specializing in the sale of collector cars for more than 30 years, now offering more than 20,000 lots per year and averaging more than one auction each month. Established by President Dana Mecum in 1988, Mecum Auctions remains a family-run company headquartered in Walworth, Wisconsin. For further information, visit Mecum.com or call 262-275-5050.

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