Description
Lax World Since 1988, Lax World has been the world’s largest lacrosse specialty superstore. They deliver top notch shafts, heads, shoes, shoulder pads, and everything else lacrosse to players and fans through their ecommerce website and their eleven retail stores.
Primary Markets Served:
North East, Mid-Atlantic, South East
Overview
Lax World’s ecommerce website sells consumer lacrosse gear and goods nationwide with a strong market on the East Coast where several of Lax World’s brick and mortar store are located. Groove and Lax World had been engaged in Groove’s strategic ecommerce marketing services for over three years. Over those years Lax World experienced phenomenal growth, and recently both parties knew it was time to upgrade to a more robust platform: the Magento Enterprise Edition.
“Groove has been such a valuable partner in growing our online business; it was an easy decision when they presented the new site concept. Their guidance and strategic thinking gives me the confidence that we can accomplish our goal of being a reliable source of products and information for our customer base,”Before moving to Magento Enterprise in 2011, Lax World had been on Miva. As the company grew, they encountered limitations and obstacles that began hindering that growth. Among them were the inability to upgrade the ecommerce platform, lack of important functionality and features, and overall inflexibility.
Challenges:
The challenge was designing and developing a site that would speak to Lax World’s unique customer groups. Because of the long history working together, Groove knew it was important to create an ecommerce website design that spoke to Lax World’s two biggest audiences—the direct purchaser, usually a parent, and the products’ end user, usually a young lacrosse player. Lax World shoppers need to be able to find what they want without any confusing roadblocks, and feel confident that they’re purchasing the right item. Groove needed to leverage Magento Enterprise’s dynamic features to customize the user experience for the varying audience shopping the site in order to provide a unique shopping experience based on their gender, playing position and buying power.
The Solution
In order to address this challenge, Groove developed custom functionality that allowed the Magento store to track the categories a user had visited then serve up dynamic banners, best sellers, and recommended products according to the browsing history. So for example, a user who had visited several female-focused categories would be served up female products and banners. In order to accomplish this, Groove customized the Dynamic Banner Extension and added an additional best-seller attribute for women. That allows products to be listed as either a male or female best seller and creates a gender dropdown field in the banner extension. The new gender dropdown allows us to specify whether the banner should be served to male visitors, female visitors, or both. By cross-referencing which banners can display with the assumed gender of the user and serve the most pertinent information.
The biggest opportunity with this functionality is that it can be repurposed to track any category in the entire store and display information that will be more targeted to the user. For example, if a user visits a category that has Virgina Tech gear, we can change the showcased products to be Virginia Tech related and possibly get a conversion that we may not have gotten otherwise.
The Magento design also allows lacrosse brand enthusiasts to easily shop for their favorite brand’s products on Magento’s brand-category pages. Each product manufacturer has their own branded page where a shopper can shop their entire line of products. Groove added a custom logo widget and a custom stylesheet to each of the said brand pages. By adding an entirely separate stylesheet on each page, each brand page can be individually designed and add varying degrees of customization.
“This site is a much better representation of how Lax World defines themselves. A serious retailer and industry leader, focused on providing a wide variety of products to their customers. With the new look and functionality our team has put in place, this site is the next step in taking their online business to the next level,”
