A Brief Background on Pro Athletics

Pro Athletics, headquartered in California, has been a leading provider of high-quality uniforms and apparel since its establishment in 2009. Originally specializing in lacrosse uniforms produced overseas, the company shifted its manufacturing operations to California in 2017 to prioritize quality and customer satisfaction. By concentrating on product development, production management, and enhancing e-commerce and distribution channels, Pro Athletics aims to deliver a seamless and exceptional ordering experience for its customers, from initial contact to order delivery.

Challenges

Pro Athletics approached us regarding their new solution. Their previous operations utilized a custom .NET-based platform for back-office operations and Shopify for the storefront. Our development and UX teams meticulously gathered requirements to create a distinctive theme that aligns with the brand image, accompanied by an enhanced UX. Additionally, we conducted a thorough audit and analysis of their current website and business processes to pinpoint crucial workflows and areas for optimization.

Difficulty in Operating Multiple Fragmented Workflows: Pro Athletics faced significant operational hurdles due to having to rely on a different solution for its customer experience storefront and managing backend operations. This resulted in fragmentation in terms of operational cohesion and management leading to business challenges in terms of customer experience and operational logistics. They wished to have a unified platform from which they could better serve their customers and run operations.

Managing and Automating an Order Flow that Seamlines with their Factory Production Model: Due to working in the apparel and apparel production industry, the actual order lifecycle for Pro Athletics is a bit different from typical eCommerce as some of their orders must go to factory production and also deal with and highlight Tech Pack Variables (TPVs) that are essential for production. They wanted their order lifecycle in the new solution to reflect these parameters in order to better synergies with their production operation.

Ability to Handle B2B Orders: Another major need for Pro Athletics was the ability to have a streamlined way to serve both their B2B customers as they make up a large portion of their core demographic. Pro Athletics encountered delays and inefficiencies in its order-to-delivery pipeline due to its intricate nature involving diverse stakeholders such as factories, Customer Service Representatives (CSRs), B2B, and B2C clients. They wanted to have an effective way to serve their B2B customers through having a convenient B2B order placement process at scale.

Having the Ability to Manage Team-Specific Stores: Being a sports apparel business, Pro Athletics typically groups all merchandise and apparel for a particular sports team or franchise. They wanted to have the ability to make team stores to manage and group together merchandise for ease of management and to provide a better shopping experience for their customers. They wanted these team stores to each have their own catalogs, branding and in some cases, team-store specific URLs.

Inefficient Order Management: Another challenge for them was synchronizing customer orders with factory dispatch and delivery schedules. Their existing manual process necessitated post-order placement calculations and communication of dispatch and delivery dates to customers, which proved to be difficult to scale and operate efficiently. They wanted the order management process in their new solution to be optimized for their workflow and to automate various aspects that currently need manual intervention.

Handling Bundled Products and Uniforms: Husqvarna wanted a way to show storefront updates and announcements to customers when they land on the homepage. They this to be handled in a way where customers can see the announcements but the UX not to obstruct the shopping experience.

Lack of Logistics Reflecting Their Sales Workflows: As previously mentioned, Pro Athletics uses a team store-based sales process. With that being the case, they wanted their solution to record logistics based on their team store-based sales to better identify key insights and data.

Handling Quotations and Custom Orders: As Pro Athletics deal with quotations and custom orders a lot of times in their sales cycle, they wanted their new platform to have support for quotations and custom orders.

Our Solution

To achieve all of our development goals for the Pro Athletics project, we conducted a thorough analysis of the business requirements alongside research to finalize the development strategy. We utilized nopCommerce platform for this project as it has a unified storefront and admin panel in a single solution and extendable nature. In terms of development, our team utilized a mostly plugin-driven approach with some source code customizations.

Developing a Team Store Client Plugin to Team Specific Store Pages and URLs: We developed a team Store Client plugin to let Pro Athletics create and manage team-based stores. Under each team store, their admins can now map products, bundle packages and apparel specific to that sports team. Each store also mentions its own order history as well for ease of management. Admins can even enable multi-store functionality for large team stores and add team store-specific URLs. This allows them to have store-specific catalogs for more efficient management and a more cohesive experience for customers by letting them find all of their favourite teams' merchandise in one place.

Image 1.2: Team store list page

Developing a Custom Order Manager Plugin to Streamline the Order Fulfilment: Aside from having team-specific catalogs, our team also enabled team store-specific order placement functionality on their storefront. Now, when orders are placed, they can be seen under that specific team’s team store in the admin. This ensures a more streamlined order management process helping increase order fulfilment efficiency as well.

CSR-Assisted Order Placement for B2C Customers: To help further streamline their order and sales lifecycle, we also developed support for customer sales representative (CSR) orders on the storefront. Now, users with the customer sales representative’s role can place orders on behalf of customers. These orders have different life cycle as they progress through various stages including Preliminary, Customer Approval, Declined, Payment Due, Templating, Standby, and History. This allows them to seamlessly automate their sales representative’s workflow on their system and help bolster a more efficient sales lifecycle.

Developing Bulk Orders through Excel for B2B Customers: To help facilitate a more optimal B2B experience on their storefront, our team developed a bulk ordering feature based on Excel upload. Admins can configure and specify which columns of information B2B customers need to fill up from the admin side and the system will generate a bulk ordering Excel based on that.

Image 1.3: Bulk order upload through Excel

Now, B2B customers can easily order in bulk by simply filling up the Excel sheet with the necessary information and completing bulk orders in a few clicks, helping to ensure a smooth B2B customer journey.

Image 1.4: Editable bulk order spreadsheet

Adding Support for Mandatory TPV Highlighting for Production Efficiency: In alignment with enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of product manufacturing, the platform incorporates a feature to automatically identify and highlight Tech Pack Variables (TPVs) that are essential for production. This functionality ensures that Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) and factories are alerted to the necessity of these variables, preventing the progression of orders until the requisite TPV selections or entries are completed. This mechanism serves to streamline the manufacturing process, reduce errors, and maintain the integrity of product specifications.

Added Support for Product Packages through Bundled Products: Help highlight their merchandise and sports apparel products further, we developed a product package feature. This lets admins create bundles of multiple products. This not only highlights certain groups of products better but lets customers easily purchase the entire package through making a single purchase.

Image 1.5: Package product details page

Adding Support for Uniform-based Product Enhancements:  To further showcase uniform-based products our team added several UX enhancements for uniform-based products, such as uniform number selection. This helped showcase uniform-based products further and gave customers a more enhanced shopping experience as well.

Image 1.6: Product details page of uniform product

Developing Quote Request Support from the Storefront: To help further enhance the customer experience, our team added quote request functionality from the storefront. Now, customers can easily create quote request with their specified requirements and information. After creating quotations, they sent to customer sales perspectives through email so they can proceed with processing the quote, contact and eventually conversion to order from their side. This aids in automating their sales workflow helping ensure fast responses.

Image 1.7: Quote Request from storefront

Robust Reporting and Logistics: To help optimize their reports and logistics to better reflect business operations, our team developed several detailed reports encompassing team store orders, team sales, package product insights, and team product purchase reports. These let them these key operational metrics and help them make data-driven decisions.

Business Impact:

• Overall store order volume increased by 5X month-over-month after transition to new solution
• Ensured streamlined business operations by moving to a single unified platform for both storefront and Admin
• Helped reduce maintenance costs through moving to a single platform as opposed to two sperate platforms
• Helped boost sales and conversions in B2C through CSR orders
• Helped boost sales and conversions through B2B Bulk orders
• Helped align sales and factory operations through highlighting Tech Pack Variables
• Ensured operation efficiency through automating order management workflow
• Automated CSR workflow through quote requests
• Helped align sales and factory operations through automate dispatch, delivery, capacity and highlighting Tech Pack Variables

Results:

• Enabled team stores page and multi-store support through team store client plugin
• Developed a custom order manager plugin to ensure team-based order fulfillment
• CSR Order assistance in B2C customer order
• Added support for bulk Excel orders for B2B customers
• Added quote request support with an optimized CSR sales pipeline
• Developed mandatory TPV highlighting, Factory capacity limit, and automate delivery Schedule for factory production efficiency
• Developed custom reports and metrics for team store orders, team sales, package product insights, and team product purchases
• Improved customer experience through UX enhancements.