SportsShoes Launches Composable Commerce Site

SportsShoes Launches Composable Commerce Site

Since the site launched earlier this year, SportsShoes has seen its sales conversion rate increase 19% year-over-year while average order value increased 10%.

BigCommerce, an open SaaS, composable ecommerce platform for fast-growing and established B2C and B2B brand and retailers, announced that SportsShoes, the UK’s largest independent retailer of sporting goods, has launched a new composable commerce website on the BigCommerce platform.

With its mission to help people lead happier, healthier lives through running and fitness, SportsShoes serves all levels of customers, ranging from elite, Olympic-level athletes to those just starting out on their fitness journeys. 

That goes hand-in-hand with offering the best online retail experience. Limited by its previous legacy system, SportsShoes tapped BigCommerce and its partner ecosystem to modernise its ecommerce operations as part of a £2.5 million website overhaul.

“We knew there was an opportunity to unlock more revenue from our website, and we took advantage of this project to set a new standard in online sports retail,” said Jon Cleaver, Chief Technology Officer at SportsShoes. “Replatforming to BigCommerce enabled us to build a best-in-class composable digital experience that is delivering exceptional results and transforming our business.”

After the site fully launched earlier this year, SportsShoes has seen its conversion rate increase 19% year-over-year while average order value increased 10% during that time.

Going into the project, Cleaver and SportsShoes knew they wanted to take a headless approach to replace the retailer’s monolithic ecommerce website. The new site uses the latest web development framework Next.js hosted on Vercel, taking advantage of its zero-configuration deployment, global scalability, availability and performance.

This new level of flexibility allows SportsShoes to easily change platforms as technology evolves, which previously would have been very time consuming and costly to change. By adopting a composable architecture, they can quickly and easily be swapped out, which showcases how digital project expertise connects with business priorities.

Since rolling out the first significant update in August 2023, SportsShoes has been on an iterative launch journey, with each progressive rollout building on customer feedback and managing risk. 

This was achieved by releasing international stores one at a time while the existing site was still trading. When the team rolled out to its largest market in the UK in early 2024, the process was seamless.

SportsShoes also leveraged BigCommerce’s Multi-Storefront functionality to create individual headless storefronts for the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Italy, France and one for their upcoming mobile app.

“SportsShoes went into the project with an innovative vision to leverage a composable architecture that would both future-proof the site but also make it immediately easier to operate, improve the checkout process and deliver engaging customer experiences,” said Mark Adams, Senior Vice President and General Manager of EMEA at BigCommerce. “Working with some of our great partners, BigCommerce was proud to help deliver this project.”