Sport2000

Case Study

03. Februar 2020

How Sport 2000 Brings the MACH Idea to Life

Peer-to-peer sports consulting – that’s the mission of SPORT 2000, one of Europe’s leading retail cooperations with over 3,500 stores in 22 member countries, under the umbrella of the ANWR Group. The goal is to offer customers across Europe not only access to exclusive brands and the latest trends in biking, fitness, lifestyle, running, outdoor, and skiing but also to create a unique shopping experience through consultations with passionate athletes and the support of innovative technologies, selling customers products that are perfectly suited to their needs.

commercetools

Shop System

MACH-Principle

Approach

founded

Revenue 2021

Challenge

SPORT 2000 aimed to completely revamp its online presence and quickly establish a fully-fledged online business system that could meet best-practice benchmarks within the industry. The goal was to provide real added value to customers while showcasing the expertise of physical retailers across various platforms. Simultaneously, they wanted to offer retailers a simple way to participate in the platform with minimal effort.

Quelle: sport2000.de 2022

Implementation

The requirements, particularly in incorporating physical retailers with a wide range of more or less consultative products across different sports, were complex. These requirements would have been difficult to achieve with standard shop systems or would have required extensive custom development. Therefore, the group opted for a MACH stack that combines various best-of-breed solutions.

Given the project’s demands, they chose the MACH principles: Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless. This approach allows the use of best-of-breed solutions for each task within the online shop’s process chain. Moreover, the tech stack is flexible, scalable, and quickly adaptable. This reduces dependence on individual software providers, lowers maintenance costs, and maximizes the quality of the tools used.

SPORT 2000’s eCommerce Manager, Tim Wiese, was quickly sold on the idea. “I know how sluggish monolithic systems can be,” he said. “On the other hand, I also knew that integrating various modules could lead to many interfaces and potentially some problems.” However, the advantage of being able to quickly and flexibly bring new ideas to life ultimately outweighed any concerns.

One of the biggest challenges was preparing the data for hundreds of thousands of products, provided by various manufacturers in different structures and qualities, so that they could be used in the shop. This is where the advantage of cloud-based best-of-breed approaches becomes apparent. The first stop for the data is the P2C platform Productsup, where the data is automatically sorted and cleaned based on various rules, resulting in uniform structure and quality. Then, the product data flows into the cloud-based PIM, Akeneo, where it is further cleaned, categorized, and enriched with images. Once the data reaches a certain level of refinement, it is automatically and API-based transferred to the underlying shop software, commercetools.

“We ensure that the data in commercetools meets the highest quality standards,” said SHOPMACHER CTO Manuel Ludvigsen-Diekmann. “And everything works fully automated based on rule sets.”

The connection between product data and prices and inventory from SPORT 2000 retailers’ ERP systems is managed by a cloud-based tool developed by SHOPMACHER, which serves as a central interface. Once the sales-ready products are in commercetools, they are automatically transferred to the cloud-based search engine Algolia. “It’s a powerful tool that offers users in the frontend very fast and smart search options,” Ludvigsen-Diekmann explains. “Retailers can decide which attributes are searchable and how filters are weighted. Additionally, Algolia learns and can automatically suggest products.”

All data in Algolia can also be utilized in Frontastic, which SPORT 2000 uses as a Frontend-as-a-Service solution to visualize the shop. To generate dynamic content in addition to static content orchestrated via Frontastic, SHOPMACHER also integrated the headless CMS Hygraph. This enables the SPORT 2000 team to manage areas such as the blog. Texts needed for the frontend are fed into Frontastic and Algolia, ensuring that this content is also visible in the shop’s search function.

When users register or order products in the shop, the data takes the reverse cloud path. It is recorded in commercetools and automatically distributed to backend systems like CRM or ERP using SHOPMACHER’s data distribution tool. Cloud-based services also handle payment processing with Adyen and email marketing.

“In essence, we’re running a large process loop with six to eight different tools,” says Ludvigsen-Diekmann. “Each tool excels at a specific task, bringing its benefits to the table. This best-of-breed approach is laser-focused on delivering quality.”

Result

The hope of leveraging a best-of-breed approach to accelerate shop development has been fulfilled. In just six months, a stable and scalable foundation for the new online presence was built. The focus in the coming months will be on utilizing this foundation to make the cooperative’s unique selling points more visible online. Initial concerns about interface issues, which gave project manager Tim Wiese some headaches at the start, largely proved unfounded. Instead, the foundation was laid to meet the online competition head-on, equipped with one of the most modern tech stacks available.

Overview

Client:

Sport2000

Result:

B2C Online Shop for Sporting Goods

Web:

sport2000.de

GoLive:

2022

Services Provided:

  • System architecture consulting
  • Technical conception & requirements management
  • Frontend and backend implementation
  • Ongoing technical support and development

Technologies:

  • Shopsoftware: commercetools
  • Frontend: Frontastic
  • Suchmaschine: Algolia
  • P2C-Plattform: Productsup
  • PIM: Akeneo
  • CMS: graphCMS
  • Payment: Adyen
  • Hosting: AWS
Highlights:
  • 100% MACH across all components
  • Complex search and filtering options
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