Using Technology to Enhance the Customer Experience
In a technology driven world, things change at a rapid pace for an eCommerce company. This is especially true with the way customers research, navigate, compare, and ultimately purchase items online. Over time, there has been a steady shift in the amount of people shopping on their phones and tablets rather than computers. To accommodate this, eCommerce retailers have had to adapt to those changing trends to continue to provide a great online shopping experience. This reason is exactly why we made the decision to overhaul JustBats.com and JustBallGloves.com by using responsive design.
What is Responsive Design?
Traditionally, most eCommerce sites, including us, used two separate versions for their website;
A desktop version that had the best content and was optimized for people to make a purchase
A mobile version with less content and different layout from the desktop site
With responsive design, the user is always getting the same, full featured version of the site optimized for whatever device they are using. A responsive site will automatically detect the screen size of the device they are using and show them the content appropriately for that space. For example, some things will stack, font sizes will change, and spacing will adjust to make sure they have a great, consistent experience regardless of how they choose to browse.
How Did We Do It?
At Pro Athlete, we are fortunate to have a world class team of developers. They were issued a challenge to do a complete platform change from scratch and have it done before the holiday season. Challenge Accepted. The team worked tirelessly for 10 straight months to make this dream become a reality. Knowing the importance of getting this out to our customers before the holiday season, the team worked until 9:00 p.m. every Tuesday night without hesitation and without sacrificing quality for time. Our development team believes perfection is in the details. Any opportunity to save our customers a click or help them find their perfect bat or glove was taken.
Was it easy? Nope. There were several roadblocks along the way the team had to figure out how to work around. There were disagreements about how things should be built. There was only one controller to play Donkey Kong and Mega Man. But, in the end, the team showed why they are an elite group of individuals who can accomplish great things when working as a team. Their alignment with our Core Values and how we play the game was on full display; Be Resourceful, Embrace Innovation, No Surprises, We Have Each Other’s Backs (just to name a few).
The Takeaway
All of our decisions at Pro Athlete are made with our customers in mind. This was no different and we will continue to leverage technology to provide a world-class experience to our fans. The talents of our employees are really able to shine on a project of this magnitude and we hope you enjoy the new sites. Let us know what you think!
If you have feedback regarding our new websites, please email us at Contact@ProAthleteInc.com.