Action Village
The
CompanyThe
ChallengeThe
SolutionThe
Result
A leading retailer specializing in paintball, snowboarding, BMX and skateboarding gear and apparel for men and women, ActionVillage.com entered the world of ecommerce in 1998. The retailer's goal was to provide a satisfying shopping experience, broad product selection by category, high-end customer service, and lowest price guarantee.
(Platform Upgrade) (Creative Services)
(Performance Optimization) (Monitoring)
(Application Development) (Usability)
(Website Redesign) (Front-end & Back-end Integration)
Having exclusively offered paintball equipment and accessories since its inception, Action Village decided to expand its inventory to include snowboarding, skateboarding, and BMX gear and apparel.
Executing this strategy meant upgrading its platform to support the features and functionality that consumers shopping for its new lines of merchandise expected. It also meant improving platform performance to deliver fast page downloads and 24/7 uptime, both of which were lacking in its existing platform.
Action Village’s platform upgrade from InterShop Enfinity 2.4 platform to Enfinity 6.1 did not go as smoothly as anticipated. Action Village’s two man IT staff struggled to correct site performance issues and how best to leverage the creative design features within Enfinity 6.1 to support its transition to a retailer of more than paintball gear and accessories.
After consulting with SysIQ Inc., which began providing managed services to Action Village in 2003, Action Village and SysIQ expanded their relationship to include troubleshooting performance problems with the new platform, application development, and website design and usability.
SysIQ’s first order of business was to identify and correct all performance issues related to implementation and then put the new platform through its paces under peak and non-peak loads to ensure a satisfying and error-free shopping experience, fast page downloads, and 24/7 uptime. Next, SysIQ took a measured approach to site design, gradually introducing new changes to the site to reflect Action Village’s move into new product lines while keeping the basic look and feel of the old site design to maintain the comfort level existing customers had with the site. The first steps of the redesign process were to add top bar navigation with roll-over directories, Ajax login, home page, directory pages, and product information pages.
With SysIQ taking the lead on the site redesign, it was able to bring more resources to bear on the project than Action Village’s two IT staffers that had been heading up the project. Key benefits of SysIQ heading up site redesign are that the company possesses the economies of scale to develop new applications at a lower cost than Action Village can in-house, and can implement those applications faster.
Action Village’s two IT staffers were eventually hired as part of the SysIQ team managing Action Village’s web site. Combined savings from this move and shifting application development to SysIQ resulted in annual savings of about $500,000 annually for Action Village.
Other changes to site design include the inclusion of buttons for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter throughout the site. Shoppers can click on these buttons to share product information with friends on those sites. Consumers are actively using social networking sites to exchange information about lifestyle products, which include outdoor gear and apparel.
Implementing top navigation with roll-over directories has allowed customers to purchase the same amount of merchandise with fewer clicks. The number of clicks per customer has declined by 30%. At the same time, Action Village is experiencing higher traffic, 99.99% uptime, better integration between front-end and back-end operations, and better integration between sales channels.
One way SysIQ has helped Action Village improve integration between front-end marketing and merchandising and back-end inventory management and fulfillment is through a customized application that allows Action Village to prepackage complementary products and accessories on-demand. Prior, Action Village needed to manually assemble and inventory the product bundles before marketing them on their website. It is a labor intensive process that limits the number of product combinations that can be bundled.
Improved site performance has been another benefit. To speed page downloads, SysIQ is continually identifying SQL query weaknesses and correcting them.
As part of its mission to be a long-term partner, SysIQ stepped in to provide the application support which allowed Action Village to reduce their annual maintenance fees, a savings of approximately 50%.
- SysIQ Client Testimonial
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"Now we can have 100 key products in stock and sell them in thousands of different combinations, SysIQ understood our needs and utilized existing functionality in Enfinity 6.1 to create a customized application in less than a month. We had been trying to do that for three years. Prior, we never had what I would call a fast site, now we do."
"For years, our company has been teaming with ideas that we believe will improve our business, but which end up on a wish list as day-to-day operations get in the way of proactive change, with SysIQ on our team we are able to flesh out the vision for our business and they figure out how to make it work. SysIQ is part of our team and they treat our business like their business and that makes a huge difference in how we evolve our business."
Bob Schubert, Owner, President
Action Village Inc.
