Everlast Worldwide Inc., a manufacturer, distributor and wholesaler of boxing and fitness products, wanted to get in the ring to fight for a bigger share of e-commerce sales.
But that meant rebuilding its e-commerce site, Everlast.com, which since 2012 had operated on the Yahoo Stores platform from the Yahoo Small Business unit of Yahoo Inc. While online sales at Everlast grew, its site didn’t scale up to handle demand from major new customers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp., says Mike Ebert, director of e-commerce at Everlast. Nor, he adds, did if offer the features Everlast sought to expand internationally and to increase sales through a growing base of business customers, including mom-and-pop gyms and amateur fighters shopping on their iPads.
Everlast’s answer was to switch its e-commerce site to Magento Enterprise, the open-source software from the eBay Enterprise unit of eBay Inc. that Ebert says offer greater customization options. Open-source software provides web developers with the core software code so that they can add the features they want.
By comparison, Everlast’s old e-commerce technology would have required a major investment to properly upgrade it, he adds. “How our web site was laid out was very, very outdated,” Ebert says. “To update the template for the front end of the web site would have been a huge investment. We decided to just jump ship and go to Magento.”
In November 2014, Everlast hired Blue Acorn, a web development agency, to update the site with the Magento software.
The new Everlast.com launched this month, following an 8-month development period. The site was built with responsive design, enabling Everlast to better handle the 50% of its traffic that comes from tablets and smartphones, says Kevin Eichelberger, Blue Acorn founder and CEO. Responsive design enables an e-commerce site to automatically adapt to the size of a visitor’s smartphone or tablet screen.
The annual fee for the Magento Enterprise starts at about $18,000; fees for the Yahoo Stores range from $29 plus a per-transaction fee of 1.50%, to $299 per month plus a per-transaction fee of 0.75%, depending on the number of features included. 178 of the top 1000 online retailers in North America use Magento, making it the top e-commerce platform provider to the largest e-retailers, according to the 2015 Internet Retailer Top 500 and 2015 Second 500. That includes retailers that use the free Magento Community edition.
Blue Acorn also worked with technology from LiveHelpNow LLC to build a live chat feature on Everlast.com, and used Candid technology from FiveAces Inc. to develop a grouping on the site of social media images organized by the hashtag #Everlast. Everlast also signed up for web site hosting by Rackspace Inc., and email marketing services from Bronto Software LLC.
About 7,000 unique visitors visit Everlast.com daily, Ebert says. That traffic and the company’s increased focus on e-commerce, he adds, helped Everlast to control about 85% of the boxing products market in 2015, as noted in a report by SportsOneSource LLC, a research firm that offers point-of-sale data and analytics in the sports and outdoor active lifestyle markets.
By late 2016, Ebert expects about 10% of Everlast sales will be processed online.
Sign up for a free subscription to B2BecNews, a weekly newsletter that covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B e-commerce industry. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, which also publishes the monthly business magazine Internet Retailer. Follow Nona Tepper, associate editor for B2B e-commerce, on Twitter @ntepper90.
Favorite