Migration to Magento for a Soccer Store
Migration to Magento
Upper 90 Teamwear creates custom soccer uniforms, apparel, and accessories for soccer clubs and teams in New York area. The company brings over 10 years of experience to provide quality customization of soccer apparel and accessories to its customers. Built on the foundation of Upper 90, a soccer specialty retail store with four locations in New York City, Upper 90 Teamwear has a dedicated team of skilled designers, printers, project facilitators and customer service representatives who handle projects for more than 40 local soccer clubs.
our challenge
Upper 90 Teamwear had previously used a SaaS platform to manage their product catalog, online sales and inventory. While the SaaS service was meeting the basic needs, the solution had quite a few limitations. The platform’s native features were often insufficient and the company that operated the SaaS platform was often unable to implement the custom modifications that Upper 90 Teamwear needed in order to better serve their customers and to improve their internal processes.
Some of the key issues that the client needed to solve included:
- no option to export clubs, customers or product data,
- lack of an independent, dedicated website section that would be easily accessible to players’ families and club supporters,
- no automated way of adding new club members via imports,
- no e-mail reminders to purchase the required club uniforms,
- no option to create or track partial shipments.
Solution
In order to solve all of the above issues, we decided to use Magento e-commerce platform, and to implement numerous custom modifications, to enable all of the requested features.
Magento was selected for this project as:
- the platform was readily available and the deployment was relatively fast,
- open-source code allows for advanced and virtually unlimited modifications,
- Magento community offers numerous modules and addons that can significantly enhance the platform’s native features,
- the client had previous experience with Magento, which allowed for an easy transition.
The implementation was complex and involved creating additional customer roles with custom privileges that would allow access to dedicated sections.
Magento catalog structure was modified to reflect club and team structure and to allow an easy and flexible way to manage clubs, teams and their dedicated product catalogs.
The project also involved retrieving club, customer and product data from the SaaS solution and moving the data over to the new Magento platform in an automated way.
Since the SaaS platform did not offer any options to export this sort of data, we developed a custom crawler solution that extracted the data and saved it in a way that allows for an easy data import to Magento. The crawler was based on PHP and utilized BeautifulSoap library. This particular solution ended up saving our client a lot of time and effort, as manually recreating the club structure and product data would have been time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Integrations
Outcome / benefits
The migration to a custom Magento platform turned out to be a major success. The new solution enabled a more efficient and flexible way of managing clubs, teams and product catalogs. The website now has two independent, dedicated store sections for players and club supporters. Catalog browsing and ordering process was fully customized in order to improve user experience and speed up the ordering process.
The time needed to create and manage clubs, teams and product catalogs in the platform was reduced by over 80%.
The new dedicated website section for club supporters and the automatic email reminders related to the required uniform products boosted the website’s sales by 22%.
Overall, the solution not only saved time by improving the processes of club and product management, but it also improved usability of the website, conversion rate and ultimately had a substantial and positive impact on the client’s profitability.
Panda Group has proven to be a very reliable and experienced company, and we consider the quality of their work as outstanding. Since we started working with Panda Group, there hasn’t been a single issue or a custom request that the agency would not be able to handle, as far as Magento programming is concerned.
Chris Gbur – E-commerce Manager