Competition Accessories

The Client

Competition Accessories is an established storefront and catalog retailer of motorcycles and related products. Competition Accessories is the second largest company in the motorcycle retail industry. As a 40-year old organization, Competition Accessories began online sales a couple of years ago using the Dynamo platform. As a clicks-and-mortar organization, they have the established pick-and-pack infrastructure to properly provide the fulfillment services needed for eCommerce. The online store manages 2,100 products sold via 20,000 SKUs.

The Business Challenge

Due to the volume of their product offering, the client had substantial challenges in managing their products and promotions. The initial Dynamo design did not enable site enhancement or changes to promotions without JHTML coding. Also, virtually no personalization was utilized. There were three primary project goals. The first goal was to upgrade the Dynamo product version and clean up the existing enhancement process (requiring JHTML) that had been built by another integrator. Secondly, Competition Accessories wanted to better serve their clients by leveraging Dynamo's personalization capabilities. Finally, the client wanted to extend its market reach by through recognition and targeted communications to members of industry-related clubs and organizations, who are traditionally heavy consumers of the products offered by Competition Accessories.

Spring and summer are the primary selling seasons for Competition Accessories and the project goals would have to be completed on a very tight schedule by McFadyen Solutions in order to minimize any downtime and loss of revenue during this critical sales season.

The Return on Investment

The project was completed by McFadyen Solutions on time and on budget. The v4.5 to v5.1 Dynamo upgrade and site redesign provided the client with improved functionality, better marketing and sales tools, and better insight to sales performance. The Dynamo upgrade provides many immediate benefits, as well as a platform for additional functionality. The Dynamo Control Center (DCC) provides an integrated interface to the online system and allows managers to make changes to their promotions and personalized messaging very easily and with absolutely no coding. Code, content, catalog, promotions, users, targeting rules, reporting, order tracking, system performance, and other functionality are all accessible through the DCC. Personalized, targeted email is now used to increase site traffic and sales. The new product catalog management capabilities ease product and SKU administration.

The upgraded eBusiness platform also provides advanced DCS benefits such as express checkout, multiple addresses, multiple payment types, pricing rule framework, inventory framework, and credit card and address verifications. Sales increased due to new merchandizing capabilities such as side-by-side product comparisons, gift certificates, coupons, wish lists, and gift registries. Customer Service Representative (CSR) tools were built into the solution to help the Competition Accessories better support their customers. The reporting capability in the DCC will also improve insight into the performance of their eCommerce operations.

An interface was designed to recognize and provide targeted interactions with the members of special interest clubs. Multiple clubs are now supported and membership is validated (via HTTP request/response or static table lookup) when a member user enters the online store.

The Technology

The prior web site was running on Dynamo v4.5.1 using the DAS, DPS, and DCS modules and was upgraded to Dynamo v5.1patch1. The Dynamo Scenario Server was installed to enable DCS but scenarios are not yet used. The hardware platform includes 4 SUN Netras (2 for web servers and 2 as application servers) and a SUN E250 server for the Oracle database. The Dynamo servers have 1 GB of RAM each and the web servers have 512 MB of RAM each. Another SUN E250 is used as a staging server. The operating system is Solaris and the database is Oracle 8i. An Apache web server is used with StrongHold for SSL security. A legacy inventory and sales system is running PIC (Purchase order and Inventory Control) on Mentor Pro but will be upgraded to Universe.

Dynamo Application Server upgrades included changes to the O/S, web server, firewall, staging environment, directory structure, JHTML files, database connections, relational views, server pages, DataSource connections, repositories, EJBs, and session backup. Dynamo Personalization Server upgrades included changes to the profile adapter repository and XML template, database schema, profile form code, targeted email methods, and the user profile (for further personalization). Dynamo Commerce Server upgrades included changes to the database schema and tables, order processing pipeline code, and migrating DCS servlet beans.

McFadyen Solutions implemented CVS for source code control. Other custom code also needed to be migrated such as event calendar functionality, club registration, batch SKU importing, and other capabilities.