Magento Website Profile: How Wilson Sporting Goods Uses Magento

Adobe Commerce is arguably the best eCommerce platform on the market, especially for large businesses and enterprises.

The breadth of what it can do “out-of-the-box” combined with its prospect for endless customizations is why household names and industry icons like Wilson Sporting Goods depend on the popular eCommerce platform to dominate their markets.

(Note: You may still know Adobe Commerce by its previous name, Magento Commerce, but Adobe purchased Magento back in 2018 and has been slowly rebranding ever since)

Recently, we broke down how Wilson has successfully leveraged Adobe Commerce to offer their customers the perfect experience for maximizing conversions. We also took a look at how Helly Hansen uses Adobe Commerce last week if you want even more proof of how powerful this platform is.

But for now, here six reasons Adobe Commerce has been incredible for Wilson Sporting Goods's online success.

Adobe isn’t just known for its eCommerce platform.

The company has built its outstanding reputation among companies across almost every industry on the back of its impressive Adobe Experience Cloud.

Just a few examples we covered in the video include:

• Adobe Analytics – We’ll go into a bit more depth into this one, but this analytics platform is perfect for large companies with numerous segments, and multiple storefronts.
• Adobe Experience Manager – Companies like Wilson love this CMS because it lets them efficiently manage content across multiple channels and seamlessly integrates with the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud.
• Adobe Audience Manager – Aside from helping to collect and organize data, AAM is also phenomenal for building actionable audience segments that business owners can use to refine their advertising efforts and ROI.

Again, those are just some examples, but it would be worth exploring how other tools like Adobe Target, Campaign, Marketo Engage, and the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud could all become your company’s competitive edge.

And soon Adobe customers will also have full access to the very powerful Adobe Firefly, which is positioned to be a real game-changer when it comes to creating customized images and other visual assets.

We wanted to specifically highlight Adobe Analytics because its powerful features have helped make it a valid alternative to the commonplace Google Analytics.

Wilson probably chose Adobe because the company does business all over the globe and through numerous storefronts. That’s a lot of data to mine, manage, and make sense of – all of which Adobe does extremely well.

As we covered in this video, Adobe Analytics also has a very manageable learning curve, which is huge for getting as many people as possible involved in leveraging your company’s analytics. And although it’s extremely popular amongst enterprises, the cost of Adobe Analytics is actually pretty reasonable.

That said, there’s no reason not to still run Google Analytics on your website, which Wilson does. It shouldn’t weigh too heavily on your load times. And if it does, look for solutions that allow you to run both.

The reason is that if, for some reason, you ever decide to ditch Adobe Analytics, you’ll be glad you still have an archive of website data saved with Google, so you’re not starting from scratch and trying to reconcile it with the historical data from Adobe – not ideal.

We’ve touched on this a few times now, but one of the big reasons we assume Wilson went with Adobe is because the platform makes it so easy to manage their many storefronts.

In the case of Wilson Sporting Goods, the company has their site for Wilson products, but also sites for the other brands they run, which are linked to in the footer:

If you click on any of those links, you’ll notice that all of the sites were built in the same format.

For example, here's Wilson's website next to the one for Louisville Slugger:

See the similarities?

But choosing Adobe Commerce doesn’t just make it easy to duplicate the same format over numerous sites.

It also makes it as easy as possible to use all of your favorite tools for each site, too, and control them through a single dashboard.

For Wilson Sporting Goods, just some of these favored tools include:

• Salesforce
• Bazaarvoice
• Crazy Egg

Building separate sites with distinct dashboards ANDa cadre of tools distinct for each one would be a massive waste of time and money.

Adobe Commerce is worth the investment alone just to avoid this kind of costly and time-consuming setup if you have ambitions of running multiple storefronts.

Whether you own a single eCommerce site or a dozen, one aspect you absolutely musttake seriously is your product pages.

And while a good product page requires all kinds of essential details, many companies increase conversions by allowing shoppers to customize their products. By using Adobe Commerce, Wilson can do this AND show shoppers what the final product will actually look like:

Check out our new volleyball:

This is one reason why many companies choose Adobe Commerce over Shopify. Despite how popular the latter has become, it can’t support the kind of customization we just mentioned.

Maybe complete customization isn’t something your company offers.

Maybe supporting configurable products is all you need to do to skyrocket conversions.

With Adobe Commerce, a configurable product appears as a single item but provides a dropdown menu with various selectable variations.

Of course, each option in the dropdown represents a distinct simple product with its own unique SKU, so you can still track individual inventory for each variation.

Here’s an example of how this looks on Wilson’s website:

And another one:

Configurable products make it easy for customers to find the products they want, pairing down endless inventories to much more manageable – and easily navigable – categories.

But that’s not the only way Adobe Commerce fuels conversions by creating effortless user experiences…

Over the last two decades, we’ve built and redesigned countless websites for all kinds of eCommerce companies.

No matter what industry they’re in or the kind of experience they’re trying to give their customers, one element we ALWAYS stress is the importance of search functionality.

Regardless of how they enter your site, the VAST MAJORITY of customers are going to rely on your site’s search bar to ultimately find the products they came for.

Adobe Commerce stands out for its search functionality thanks in large part to the very impressive Adobe Sensei. This incredible smart technology is powered by Adobe’s machine learning and artificial intelligence. Adobe Sensei analyzes the search behavior of your customers and the product-related content of your customers to help shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for – even if they’re not always entirely sure.

Like any good search engine, it will allow the search bar on your site to autocomplete customers’ queries as they enter them AND bring up the corresponding products for them.

Wilson also utilizes another of our favorite eCommerce tools, Klevu.

The search and discovery solution provides advanced search functionality, including:

• Intelligent Product Search
• Autocomplete
• Personalization Features

All of these features enhance Wilson’s user experience and help their customers find products more effectively.

In the Age of Amazon, shoppers expect that every website will be just as user-friendly as the massive eCommerce giant. Adobe Commerce makes this possible for brands of all sizes, so you never lose shoppers because their lofty expectations weren’t met.

Wilson doesn’t stop there, though.

Adobe Commerce’s layered navigation helps ensure their shoppers find these powerful product pages.

For example, these shoppers can apply product attributes to quickly narrow down their options even further based on their own personal preferences until they’re left with only the products most likely to meet their specific demands:

And going back to the product pages, as customers scroll down to learn more about the product, they are never far from the ability to make a purchase right away:

This holds up on mobile, too:

So, even from a handheld device, shoppers can easily become customers.

While we love the Wilson website and how the company employed Adobe Commerce to build it, we did find one area that they could target for improvement: their checkout page.

To be fair, this is a pretty common challenge for just about every eCommerce company, which is why the average cart abandonment rate tends to hover around 70%(and why we HIGHLY recommend you employ abandoned cart emails to recover some of those sales).

Wilson uses the standard checkout page that Adobe Commerce provides out-of-the-box.

Which…is fine.

But if you’re serious about reaching the highest possible conversion rates for your eCommerce business, we always recommend our clients implement a checkout solution that’s designed to drop cart abandonment rates and maximize checkout completions.

Two we cover in the video above were:

• Bolt –Bolt is “on a mission to perfect the checkout experience for online retailers and make sure nothing gets in the way when shoppers decide to buy.” In just a short amount of time, it’s become hugely popular with a wide range of companies.
• Dominate –We actually built thischeckout extension specifically because we didn’t think the perfect solution existed for eCommerce companies. Just like Adobe Commerce, it’s 100% customizable, works with any platform, supports subscriptions, and is completely free.

To be clear: A LOT goes into achieving an above-average conversion rate. And again, Wilson does a lot of this really, really well.

But if you want to reach the pinnacle of profitability, you really need to add a premium checkout platform to get you there.

In short, yes.

If you run an eCommerce company, especially if you have a sizable inventory, and you need a highly-customized website to meet your unique market’s specific needs, then you should DEFINITELY check out Adobe Commerce.

Still not sure?

Feel free to contact us to speak with an Adobe expert about whether or not it makes sense for your business. Also, we have posts on Magento pricing and also offer Magento migration services if you're interested in switching over.