Fanatics, Inc.

The perfect play

If you’ve ever ordered sports-branded merchandise online – whether from your college or your favorite pro sports team’s website – you probably bought it from Fanatics, Inc. The largest online collegiate and professional sports store in the world, Fanatics sells the merchandise for thousands of teams across the country. The massive operation, however, demands a unique set of capabilities after championships and bowl games. In the past, after a team won a big game, the site would get hit with a flood of traffic that would slow server speeds if not taking the site down completely. The WebLinc eCommerce System not only solved the problem, it streamlined all of their data making day to day operations, in addition to surge days, smoother.

The catalyst for the initial move to WebLinc came after a Super Bowl victory that prompted tens of thousands of site visits immediately following the game. The onslaught caused a total system crash that resulted in missing the opportunity for thousands of purchases. This called into question every major event in the future that would bring higher traffic and bigger revenue as an opportunity for another possible crash. WebLinc’s answer, launched in a matter of months, reduced 25 servers worth of data to just two streamlined servers managing over thousands of websites, each with a different administrative system generating thousands of orders each day.

Using a single instance of WebLinc eCommerce, Fanatics created affiliate sites for all the different teams, effectively spreading the load and stabilizing each distinct site. Basically, each Fanatics client can customize their own look-and-feel, manage their own promotions, and create their own business rules using the WebLinc eCommerce platform. A Philadelphia newspaper, for instance, can set their site to exclusively sell current Philly merchandise, plus vintage jerseys of Hall of Fame players – of course, excluding everything branded Dallas (Philadelphia’s arch rival). WebLinc also enabled A/B testing for all the sites, SEO marketing enhancements and complete manageability. Since launching, Fanatics has seen major increases in conversions, customer satisfaction and overall site reliability.

Created on a tight schedule, WebLinc came through in the clutch for Fanatics Inc. giving them the stability and scalability to manage their massive portfolio of sites without putting a strain on any one element when another sees huge traffic surges. This enabled their team to focus on the more important issue of creating sales rather than worrying about the site crashing every time someone’s favorite team won the big game – a touchdown in anyone’s book.

Visit the site: Football Fanatics