History
In 1999, The Sports HQ began as an Ebay store, and are still a prominent trader on eBay today. The Managing Director of The Sports HQ realised that trading with his own e-commerce website would increase his coverage on the Internet, even though the Ebay business was highly successful. He contacted Shopframe and we built the first website, www.thegolfhq.com, back in 2000. TheGolfHQ soon became TheSportsHQ, and website took off. Today, Sports PLC owns a suite of online stores, all developed and hosted by Shopframe.
Challenges
In a highly competitive market, Sports PLC required a partnership with an e-commerce provider that could deliver both in terms of online marketing success and technological excellence. Shopframe's philosophy is that e-commerce success can only happen through a combination of both of these, so it was a perfect partnership.
Search Engine Optimisation
In order to achieve top search rankings for terms such as "golf balls" and "golf clubs", Shopframe created a long term strategy that included an agressive "article writing" policy. Every day, several information and news articles are written about key subjects within the golf and sports area and posted to the Sports PLC website. This is just one of many techniques used to maintain a dominant position.
Technology
Shopframe are continually developing Sports PLC's e-commerce web applications. With ten websites in the portfolio, all websites run off a single e-commerce engine, developed in-house by Shopframe. With thousands of orders every day, there are many features enabling Sports PLC to quickly and efficiently process orders during the day.
With thousands of orders per day comes hundreds of thousands of visitors. To service the requests efficiently, Sports PLC's systems are spread out around several servers hosted in the UK and the USA. Over the years several major upgrades have taken place all without any "downtime", enabling Sports PLC to continue to trade seamlessly whilst constantly increasing their capacity to trade.
Overview
Shopframe's delivered a complete system for Sports PLC, enabling them to:-
- Achieve world class search rankings on terms such as "golf clubs"
- Analyse and report on their success in fine detail
- Run unlimited websites from a single framework, meaning all website management, stock control and order management is done from a single database
- Run websites in different locations across the globe with Stock and Order history maintained and synchronised throughout the whole system.
- Manage all website content from one place. For example, products and categories can be copied or moved between their portfolio of websites using a drag & drop interface.
- Despatch orders using a mobile application designed for handhelds. Sports PLC warehouse staff can pick and despatch orders quickly without error. Only once orders are despatched, customers are automatically billed.
Future
With an ever expanding portfolio of business, we expect Sports PLC to continue to grow rapidly. This will involve the development of more websites, more features and an ever-expanding technical infrastructure.