Stadium Goods, a leader in rare sneakers and streetwear, faced mounting challenges with their bespoke ecommerce platform FPS, including slow site speed, high maintenance costs, and limited scalability. The Stadium Goods site was hindering the brand's ability to grow and maintain their reputation for exceptional service. Partnering with VAAN and Shopify, Stadium Goods replatformed to Shopify to unlock greater efficiency, flexibility, and customer satisfaction.
Since moving to Shopify and working with VAAN, Stadium Goods has seen:
- An 80% overall increase in conversion rate
- A 36% YOY increase in Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) web conversion rate
- A 100% YOY increase in BFCM app conversion rate
- A 46% increase in add-to-cart rate
Challenge: Scaling a marketplace for rare sneakers
Stadium Goods built their reputation as a go-to marketplace for rare sneakers and streetwear with a unique two-way model that tracks serialized inventory and assigns custom prices to individual items. However, as the business scaled into a direct-to-consumer and multichannel powerhouse, their custom ecommerce platform became a liability.
Their bespoke platform suffered with slow site speeds, frequent technical challenges, and high maintenance costs, which limited Stadium Goods’ ability to grow and adapt quickly. They needed a modern, scalable solution that could handle their complex marketplace operations while enhancing the customer experience and reducing operational inefficiencies.
The Stadium Goods team, like many merchants, often discussed migrating to Shopify due to roadblocks with their current platform while having unique consigner requirements. By working in lockstep with Vann and Stadium Goods, we were able to propose a solution that not only met their needs but also positions them well for future growth.
The solution: Migrating to Shopify before the holiday season
To address these challenges, Stadium Goods partnered with VAAN to migrate from their custom bespoke platform to Shopify. The project required a rapid turnaround to ensure the new platform was live before the peak of the holiday season. Detailed guidance on optimizing product structure, data migration paths, and aligning their PIM and OMS workflows was vital. Key aspects of the solution included:
- Data migration oversight: Migration of the extensive product catalog, serialized inventory, and customer data to Shopify ensured the integrity of their marketplace model.
- Optimized design: Applying their Brand Conversion Design philosophy, the VAAN team optimized the site design in accordance with Shopify theme-design paradigms.
- Custom integrations: Tapcart was implemented for mobile app functionality and Braze for advanced email marketing, supporting Stadium Goods’ omnichannel strategy.
- Back-end flexibility: The migration simplified content and theme management, allowing the internal team to handle updates while freeing developers to focus on innovation.
VAAN has been an incredibly nimble, collaborative, and impactful partner, helping us migrate from a custom eCommerce platform to Shopify at lightning speed. We set a very aggressive timeline (in spite of our size and complexity), and we hit it, landing one of the smoothest platform migrations I’ve seen, in time for holiday peak. A few weeks post-transition, we’re already seeing a double-digit improvement in conversion rate, and material reduction in our cost of ownership. VAAN was instrumental in this achievement.
The Results: Dramatic increases in conversion and add-to-cart rate
The transition to Shopify transformed Stadium Goods’ ecommerce performance. The platform's robust infrastructure and VAAN’s streamlined design contributed to an 80% increase in conversion rates and substantial savings in total cost of ownership.
Stadium Goods’ journey to Shopify highlights the impact of a well-executed platform migration. With VAAN’s expertise, they’ve not only solved the issues of speed, flexibility, and cost, but have positioned themselves for scalable, sustainable growth in the DTC market.
At VAAN, we prioritize leveraging public dependencies and resources to ensure flexibility and compatibility with Stadium Goods' preferred systems. This approach enabled a seamless migration to GitLab alongside the transition to Shopify. By utilizing docker containers to encapsulate processes, we ensured consistent functionality regardless of the environment in which they run.
"Our goal is to empower clients by providing everything they need—whether it’s direct access to the code or ensuring any external dependencies are publicly available," says Illarion Koperski. "This way, we avoid creating restrictions or owning critical components, giving merchants full access and control over their systems."
The Stadium Team also saw an increase of 46% in add-to-cart rate as a result of replatforming to Shopify, as well as significant year-over-year increases in conversion during their peak Black Friday Cyber Monday sales with a 36% YOY increase in BFCM web conversion rate and a 100% YOY increase in BFCM app conversion rate with their Tapcart instance.
The Shopify replatforming has given Stadium Goods a powerful, adaptable digital presence that resonates with their brand and supports their future ambitions. Through a strategic partnership with VAAN and the power of Shopify, Stadium Goods now stands equipped to lead and grow in an ever-evolving market.
