Pro Athletics: Business Transformation Journey of a U.S.-based Sports Apparel Company Through nopCommerce

Pro Athletics, headquartered in California, has been a leading provider of high-quality uniforms and apparel since its establishment in 2009. Pro Athletics approached nopStation with the task to optimize their current workflows and operations on the custom .NET-based platform.

Pro Athletics previously used a custom .NET-based platform for back-office operations and Shopify for the storefront. nopStation’s development and UX teams meticulously gathered requirements to create a distinctive theme that aligns with the brand image, accompanied by an enhanced UX. Additionally, they conducted a thorough audit and analysis of the current website and business processes to pinpoint crucial workflows and areas for optimization.

Challenges

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 operational and management fragmentation leading to business challenges in terms of customer experience and operational logistics.

Managing and automating an order flow that seamlines with their factory production model: Due to working in the apparel 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.

Handling B2B orders: Another major need for Pro Athletics was to be able to simplify their service to B2B customers. 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 a convenient B2B order placement process at scale.

Managing 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 with catalogs, branding and in some cases, team-store specific URLs for these team stores.

Inefficient order management: Another challenge was synchronizing customer orders with factory dispatch and delivery schedules. The existing manual process necessitated post-order placement calculations and communication of dispatch and delivery dates to customers. They wanted the order management process to be optimized for their workflow and automated.

Handling bundled products and uniforms: Due to their product portfolio consisting of sports apparel and uniforms they requested several enhancements such as support for bundled products and a customized UX for uniforms.

Lack of logistics reflecting their sales workflows: As Pro Athletics uses a team store-based sales process, 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.

Solution

To achieve all of the development goals for the Pro Athletics project, nopStation conducted a thorough analysis of the business requirements alongside research to finalize the development strategy. They 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, the team used a mostly plugin-driven approach with some source code customizations.

Developing a team store client plugin to team specific store pages and URLs: 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.

Team store list page

Developing a custom order manager plugin to streamline the order fulfilment: 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: Support for customer sales representative (CSR) orders on the storefront helps further streamline the order and sales lifecycle. 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.

Developing bulk orders through excel for B2B customers: To help facilitate a more optimal B2B experience on their storefront, nopStation 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.

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.

Editable bulk order spreadsheet

Adding support for mandatory TPV highlighting for production efficiency: 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: 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.

Package product details page

Adding support for uniform-based product enhancements: To further showcase uniform-based products nopStation 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.

Product details page of uniform product

Developing quote request support from the storefront: Now, customers can easily create quote request with their specified requirements and information. After creating quotations, they are 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.

Quote Request from storefront

Robust Reporting and Logistics: To help optimize their reports and logistics to better reflect business operations, nopStation developed several detailed reports encompassing team store orders, team sales, package product insights, and team product purchase reports. These provide Pro Athletics with 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
• Streamlined business operations on a single unified platform for both storefront and admin
• Reduced maintenance costs through moving to a single platform as opposed to two sperate platforms
• Boost sales and conversions in B2C through CSR orders and in B2B through bulk orders
• Aligned sales and factory operations through highlighting Tech Pack Variables
• Operation efficiency through automating order management workflow
• Automated CSR workflow through quote requests
• Aligned sales and factory operations through automate dispatch, delivery, capacity and highlighting Tech Pack Variables

Results:

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

nopStation is the #1 Gold Solution Partner of nopCommerce and an eCommerce wing of Brain Station 23 Ltd., a top-ranking software development company with a global presence. Team nopStation designs, builds and enhances eCommerce solutions on top of the nopCommerce platform for clients of all business sizes. The company has technology partnerships with 12+ leading ISVs including Microsoft, Google, and AWS. The company help its customers build their business online by developing the right eCommerce solution using nopCommerce at a competitive price and reasonable timeline.