Hammer Nutrition
Simple, Modern
and Effective
eCommerce.
Industry: Health and Wellness
Website: Hammernutrition.com
Services: Migration, B2B, Custom Development, Middleware
The Challenge:
Legacy eCommerce suite
slowed growth
Hammer Nutrition is a leading endurance sports nutrition company founded in 1987. They offer a wide range of supplements and nutritional products, as well as clothing, body care products, accessories, and more.
Recently, they overcame a big challenge — their website.
A significant portion of Hammer Nutrition’s sales came through their website, which was hosted on the legacy eComm platform SuiteCommerce.
This platform has served them well when they first launched it, but it was no longer meeting Hammer Nutrition’s needs.
“SuiteCommerce promised an all-in-one ERP and eCommerce solution, but over time it fell short,” said Vince Arnone, Chief Technology Officer at Hammer Nutrition. “The more we customized it the worse its performance became, its eCommerce technology was poor, the way it tied our website to the ERP was cumbersome, and it had limited compatibility with 3rd party apps and software.”
Overall, Hammer Nutrition felt that SuiteCommerce was:
Difficult to Maintain:
It needed a developer to make simple changes, perform small updates, and add new marketing content
Expensive to Operate:
Between the platform fees themselves and the price to make changes, its total operating costs were growing too high
Old and Outdated:
It lacked standard or custom eCommerce features, such as streamlined checkouts and conversion rate optimization
Worst of all, SuiteCommerce was holding back Hammer Nutrition’s growth. They had multiple eComm projects that were sitting in limbo, or never even launched, all because their platform didn’t meet their requirements.
The Tipping Point:
The negative business impact of legacy eCommerce
Hammer Nutrition’s website performance kept degrading.
Eventually, their website changed from being an asset, to something that was negatively impacting their business.
They spent significant time and effort trying to fix their website’s performance issues using their existing solutions. They dug through the NetSuite ecosystem trying to identify and fix the root cause of their problems.
“Because our website and ERP were so closely tied together, it was exceedingly hard and costly to find the sources of performance degradation, and to implement fixes,” explained Vince.
They worked hard, and regained some of their website’s performance. But ultimately they came to accept they had a fundamental issue with how their ERP was tied to their eCommerce platform.
Hammer Nutrition knew they needed to migrate to a new, modern eComm platform — one that resolved all of the issues created by SuiteCommerce — and fast.
Their Solution:
Why they chose Shopify
“After comparing options, Shopify Plus emerged as the logical choice,” said Vince. Shopify Plus offered better performance, had best-in-class eCommerce functionality baked in, and was more customizable and more compatible with 3rd party applications and software.
Overall, Hammer Nutrition saw that Shopify Plus was:
Easy to Maintain
They could change, updated, and add content to their website without hiring a development team.
Cost Effective
It would reduce their technical debit, give them predictable maintenance costs, and lower total operating costs.
Modern and Effective
It offered features like Shop Pay and Shopify Checkout that would improve their site’s UX and conversion rates.
With Shopify, Hammer Nutrition knew they could fix the performance issues they were experiencing with SuiteCommerce, grow their online sales, and launch and deliver the ambitious eComm projects they had been sitting on.
Yet Hammer Nutrition also knew migrating to Shopify would be a big project. Their existing website was large and complex, and they lacked the internal bandwidth and expertise to migrate it.
They knew they couldn’t perform this migration on their own, and they began to look for a partner.
That’s when they found MTN Haus.
Their Partner:
Picking MTN Haus
Hammer Nutrition worked with their Shopify Plus Account Executive to find a few Shopify Plus Partners to consider. Hammer Nutrition took calls with all of them, but ultimately chose to work with MTN Haus for a few core reasons.
MTN offered Hammer Nutrition:
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Shopify knowledge, expertise, and migration experience
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Rapid development timelines and a cost-effective price point
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A no-BS way of working, partnering up, and getting the job done
Most important — MTN offered exactly what Hammer Nutrition needed in a partner.
“We are experts in knowing what we need and how our systems need to work. We didn’t need a large agency partner to hand over the keys and say ‘go’,” explained Vince. “MTN Haus fit our needs. They were a nimble, down-to-earth agency that understood our technical requirements and worked to make them happen in Shopify Plus.”
Hammer Nutrition made the call, and picked Shopify and MTN to transform their eCommerce experience.
Their Results:
Simple, modern, and effective eCommerce
Together, Hammer Nutrition and MTN quickly migrated their website from SuiteCommerce to Shopify. Their new platform delivered to expectation, and:
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Made their website easier to maintain and update, and lets a non-technical marketing team member manage content on their own.
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Reduced their total cost of ownership, as well as the complexity and frustration they experienced running their prior platform.
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Lets them add new features or changes to their website, and accelerated the development and release cycle of any changes.
“By migrating to Shopify Plus we met our goals, and we now have a solid performing, nimble eCommerce platform that we’ve extensively configured and customized to meet our needs”
By migrating to Shopify and partnering with MTN, Hammer Nutrition has already been able to add new features and complete new eComm projects.
These include:
Adding subscriptions to their website
MTN installed a custom back-end application that lets Hammer Nutrition manage subscriptions and pricing during sales, as well as handle gifts and other promotions.
Extending fulfillment
MTN integrated a new fulfillment location, using the 3PL’s API to send data, transmit order updates, and allow communication between the 3PL and NetSuite.
Staying ahead of updates
MTN saw the platform’s existing checkout customizations would soon be deprecated, and are in the process of upgrade to Shopify Checkout One to further extend functionality.
This migration and these changes are only the beginning.
Hammer Nutrition has retained MTN as a technical partner to provide ongoing support, to assist with large-scale projects, and to find new ways to use Shopify to improve their business and add value to their customers.
“We’ve moved both our B2C and B2B websites to Shopify with MTN Haus and have continued to improve and build upon a solid eCommerce foundation instead of just trying to survive on a platform,” said Vince, before he summed up their new position perfectly.
“We look forward to a bright future on Shopify Plus with MTN Haus as our agency partner.”
