When a 40 year-old, multi-million dollar publicly traded licensed sports product wholesaler decides in 2012 that it’s finally time to come to the eCommerce party, it’s kind of a big deal.
Since 1971, Great American Products had done business the old school Chicago way, with a majority of its customers still used to making purchases by phone or faxed P.O.
But as industry becomes more regulated, requiring a heavier load of information to be transferred more frequently, quickly and efficiently, what once seemed like a novelty to the company’s founder was to become a reality within 6 months.
My first wireframes, with their homepage buckets and category landing pages presented a somewhat more retail browsing experience than the initial test groups were willing to wade through. I discovered that the target user for a Great American Products estore would generally know what they want before arriving at the site, so my job was to design a store that would get customers to where they need to go, quickly and efficiently.
The result has been a low abandonment rate, higher conversion and an overall 150% growth in business since launching the store in Q1 of 2013.
I scaled up search to feature much more prominently, while populating the main mega-menu tab bar with leagues first, then teams, followed by product categories in the sidebar menu upon team selection.
