Leading sports gear merchant Rally House recruited Miva to build a faster, more scalable website to meet their massive inventory needs, time-sensitive promotions, and growing customer base.
The Results
If you're a sports fan, you've probably heard of Rally House–the go-to destination for all your favorite team's gear, accessories, and gifts. With a massive following and stores spread all over America, Rally House has become the ultimate hub for passionate sports enthusiasts. However, as the brand grew and expanded to new locations and bigger audiences, they needed a powerful ecommerce platform that could keep up with their increasing demand.
Rally House's brand mission is simple: to delight their customers by providing the best possible shopping experience, both in-store and online. However, they felt their previous SuiteCommerce solution was holding them back from this goal. Their store was plagued by performance problems, including poor site speed and frequent outages at high traffic/high-value times, such as the airing of huge sporting events. These limitations forced Rally House to compromise on essential UX best practices, potentially frustrating customers and hindering sales.
To grow and scale the business, Rally House needed a snappy and appealing shopping experience that could keep up with the robust needs of a massive inventory and very time-sensitive promotions. The brand uses NetSuite to manage various aspects of their business, so they also needed a platform that could accommodate a power integration capable of meeting their complex data needs–this would allow them to quickly get updates and leverage NetSuite to manage their expansive catalog effectively. Weaving their physical retail business with the ecommerce website via popular BOPIS/Click-and-collect functionality was also a priority.
A slow website could mean the difference between a loyal customer and a lost sale, making site speed absolutely critical for Rally House. Pages needed to load very fast, promotions needed to launch without a hitch, and the transfer of data from one vital system to the next had to be flawless. All these factors led Rally House to the best ecommerce solution for their business: Miva.
Rally House wasn't just looking for any ecommerce solution; they were in search of a teammate who could elevate their game. Rally House chose to partner with Miva because they appreciated the total flexibility of the Miva platform, with highly customizable features and expert teams ready to build out those custom solutions. Having dedicated account managers and a sophisticated Professional Services team available to help address issues as they came up was a key factor in the choice.
The brand was also excited to use Miva's integration service, Miva Connect, to build a NetSuite integration that could support fast product updates and catalog updates from their NetSuite system. Miva Connect exemplifies Miva's willingness and ability to customize the platform to meet a business's specific needs and is the latest facet of the comprehensive customer support that Miva is well-known for.
Miva began by performing a deep data and process analysis to truly understand Rally House's data needs and what new data flows needed to be integrated. To facilitate the re-platforming process, the Miva team took a holistic look at Rally House's total business processes, examining and organizing data from a vast product catalog and customer base. As a true partner in the brand's success, Miva needed to assemble a thorough portrait of the merchant process to pinpoint areas for increased performance, uncovering various workarounds and practices that had been in place for years but could be improved.
"Off-the-shelf" solutions that promise easy data integrations are generally only suitable for the simplest, limited use cases. Rally House's extensive catalog requires a solution that can handle a massive data throughput, which would entail an unusually complex and high-volume integration.
Miva's high-performance solution is uniquely capable of handling an integration of this volume, blowing past the hard limits on API calls of many competitors. Unlike other solutions, Miva has no preset limits on API calls, either in quantity or rate of request.
Miva Connect built a customized integration to bring all of Rally House's existing customer, order, and product data into Miva and prepared it to work seamlessly with NetSuite. Among other key functions, this integration powers faster and more efficient management of BOPIS and other fulfillment modes.
Miva also partnered with search and merchandising engine Searchspring to increase the reliability and speed of time-sensitive product launches. Rally House needed to be able to pre-load products and prepare them for launch depending on the results of external events, such as the announcement of the winner of a high-profile championship. Customers flock to the site on game days, causing a surge in demand for products representing their favorite teams, especially after a big win. As a result, special promotions, products, and offers have to coincide with live results on the fly. Miva built functionality that allows the brand to respond to the latest news in real-time, launching the correct set of "winning" products very quickly. When a game is over, Rally House can now immediately launch specific related products, delighting fans.
An important aspect of operational speed is the ability of marketing and content teams to create and manage website pages at a high level of excellence without the hassle and expense of turning to developers for every tiny change. Miva's easy-to-use PageBuilder tool makes this possible, giving Rally House's marketing team direct control over site content for the first time.
Finally, a new store locator was built to support brick-and-mortar locations from the website, powered by Moz Local and Uberall, giving Rally House an edge over its competitors.
Miva's ability to handle robust data and process needs, along with the tight integration of software development and professional services departments, has made re-platforming a cost-effective advantage for Rally House. With Miva, different teams can work together collaboratively, ensuring that Rally House can succeed in a highly competitive market.
Across the board, Rally House's results exceeded their expectations, with outstanding performance improvements and a surge in conversions. Just three months after the site launch, Rally House experienced dramatic increases in revenue, conversion rate, number of transactions, and average order value.
Site speed, another top priority for the brand, also saw substantial improvements. Google PageSpeed Insights measures the speed and efficiency of the website. According to Google, Rally House's new Miva site performance improved by a massive 57%. For mobile performance, NetElixir's audit of the new site noted that mobile-specific speed performance on the homepage had improved by 52%.
With their new lightning-fast, fully integrated, high-converting website, Rally House is turning an outstanding shopping experience into major revenue gains. Miva helps the brand deliver on its promise to delight customers by supporting increasing demand, coordinating operations across brick-and-mortar and online, and connecting its extensive and robust product catalog with sports fans from coast to coast. Now that's team spirit you can take to the bank.
