Skechers may be a global brand in 2024, but it did not always have the ecommerce platform and technology stack it needed to reach its current size. Eric Cheng, the director of ecommerce architecture of Skechers USA Inc. opened up at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco about some of the choices that made a difference as the shoe and apparel brand expanded and updated its website and content capabilities.

“Today, we’re present in over 180 countries worldwide,” he explained on stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

That journey for Skechers began in 1992 and eventually took it across borders on the feet of shoppers around the world.

“We connect hundreds of millions of customers through our retail stores and ecommerce platform to deliver this unique experience,” Cheng said, emphasizing that each market presents unique needs that his team needs to be ready to serve.

Skechers ranks No. 273 in the Top 1000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American e-retailers by online sales. There, Skechers is categorized as an Apparel & Accessories retailer. Digital Commerce 360 projects that Skechers online sales will reach $320.65 million in 2024.

Skechers web sales by year

Ecommerce platform challenges for Skechers

Eric Cheng, director of ecommerce architecture at Skechers, speaking at Dreamforce in San Francisco

“The journey did not just happen overnight,” Cheng said. “In fact, it took time and effort.”

Looking back, he put the issues Skechers addressed into three groups.

“We faced a number of challenges, and these challenges were categorized in three main critical areas: content management, scalability and customer experience,” he explained.

The legacy system in place lacked “a robust tool to allow us to deliver content efficiently,” he said.

Those shortcomings extended to issues related to workflow and localization.

“We were not able to preview the content that was scheduled, and that posed a significant challenge,” he said. “Imagine this: If we needed to launch a marketing page at midnight, our content team would literally have to stand by and be able to publish it.“

As Cheng described, this process might have been manageable “for one or two countries,” but “not for 17.”

How Skechers addressed its ecommerce problems 

Ultimately, Skechers chose a set of solutions working with Astound Digital, whose senior vice president of commerce, Kyle Montgomery, joined Cheng to present at Dreamforce.

Montgomery said Skechers went with Salesforce Service Cloud and Manhattan Active Omni, which helped with order management.

“Their vision was to unify — to supply, unify and scale,” Montgomery recalled.

The new set of solutions allowed Skechers to bring 17 countries across Europe, Japan and North America onto a single platform.

Jennifer Lane, who is the director of success guides at Salesforce, also appeared on stage to walk through design flexibility Cheng’s team looked to Salesforce’s Page Designer to achieve.

In addition, they were able to find translation solutions on Salesforce’s AppExchange, which alleviated some localization friction.

Other integrations included offerings from Thomson Reuters for text, CyberSource for a payment gateway and Salesforce Marketing Cloud for personalization.

Solutions through its ecommerce platform changes

In his presentation, Cheng cited three key areas where Skechers saw improvements following its changes. First, he said the content creation and localization tools saved enough time so that operational efficiency increased by more than 500%. Next, he said the company reduced the amount of time it took to launch in new markets, reducing timeframes from five months down to a few weeks.

In addition, the brand saw positive sales growth after implementation.

“From our 2023 first-quarter earnings release, we saw [a] 24.5% increase in the direct-to-consumer segment, and that was a significant result,” Cheng stated.

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