BigCommerce (Nasdaq: BIGC), an open SaaS, composable e-commerce platform for fast-growing and established B2C and B2B brand and retailers, today announced that SportsShoes, the UK’s largest independent retailer of sporting goods, has launched a new composable commerce website on the BigCommerce platform.
With its mission to help people lead happier, healthier lives through running and fitness, SportsShoes serves all levels of customers, ranging from elite, Olympic-level athletes to those just starting out on their fitness journeys. That goes hand-in-hand with offering the best online retail experience. Limited by its previous legacy system, SportsShoes tapped BigCommerce and its partner ecosystem to modernize its ecommerce operations as part of a £2.5 million website overhaul.
“We knew there was an opportunity to unlock more revenue from our website, and we took advantage of this project to set a new standard in online sports retail,” said Jon Cleaver, chief technology officer at SportsShoes. “Replatforming to BigCommerce enabled us to build a best-in-class composable digital experience that is delivering exceptional results and transforming our business.”
After the site fully launched earlier this year, SportsShoes has seen its conversion rate increase 19% year-over-year while average order value increased 10% during that time.
Going into the project, Cleaver and SportsShoes knew they wanted to take a headless approach to replace the retailer’s monolithic e-commerce website. The new site uses the latest web development framework Next.js hosted on Vercel, taking advantage of its zero-configuration deployment, global scalability, availability and performance. This new level of flexibility allows SportsShoes to easily change platforms as technology evolves. Which previously would have been very time consuming and costly to change. By adopting a composable architecture, they can quickly and easily be swapped out, which showcases how digital project expertise connects with business priorities.
Since rolling out the first significant update in August 2023, SportsShoes has been on an iterative launch journey, with each progressive rollout building on customer feedback and managing risk. This was achieved by releasing international stores one at a time while the existing site was still trading. When the team rolled out to its largest market in the UK in early 2024, the process was seamless.
SportsShoes also leveraged BigCommerce’s Multi-Storefront functionality to create individual headless storefronts for the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Italy, France and one for their upcoming mobile app.
“SportsShoes went into the project with an innovative vision to leverage a composable architecture that would both future-proof the site but also make it immediately easier to operate, improve the checkout process and deliver engaging customer experiences,” said Mark Adams, senior vice president and general manager of EMEA at BigCommerce. “Working with some of our great partners, BigCommerce was proud to help deliver this project.”
Behind the scenes, the project has transformed the SportsShoes team’s ability to execute. Compared to the previous web and content development models, the company now has a more cohesive team approach to get the best content online and quickly in front of customers. As a multi-brand retailer, this is particularly important because success depends on the strength of the products and their associated content. Now, more than 30 people across teams use Prismic.io CMS to execute updates from changing an image to publishing a product article in several languages. The website is constantly being refreshed adding articles, products, store pages and other content without a need to change code. Over 80% of the site is driven from dynamic content, so when users are browsing, they can access real world content such as product reviews or training insights before transitioning seamlessly to shop directly from the content and check out quickly. The project also resulted in a significantly upskilled technical team. SportsShoes’ back-end developers, who were mostly PHP developers, upgraded their skills to manage the AWS cloud-based technologies behind the new site.
“This project represents a significant change in our ability to provide the quickest and most intuitive online purchasing experience for all our customers,” Cleaver said. “This is particularly important since a growing part of our business plan is to engage with the running community. Whether they are elite or casual, it is important they can access the best products to suit their needs. For amateur runners in particular, this is a significant addressable market and a focus for future development.”
A runner himself, Cleaver helped design and refine the new site’s Running Shoe Finder feature, which asks customers a series of questions about the type of running they do in order to recommend products.
