How LAX.com reduced costs, gained control, and upgraded their eComm platform — with Shopify and MTN

LAX.com is the leading eCommerce retailer for the sport of lacrosse. It’s their vision to become the lacrosse community’s single source for gear, and on their website they sell thousands of products.

Their eCommerce website is the home for everything they do, but for many years they struggled to manage this platform.

The reason was simple — they were hosting their website through SAP Commerce Cloud. And as they grew, Commerce Cloud failed to meet their needs.

"Commerce Cloud was too rigid and costly,” said Ty Dlugozim, Director of Technology at LAX.com. “It limited our ability to make fast updates and optimize our user experience.”

Every time LAX.com needed to make even the smallest change to their website, they had to file a ticket with their Commerce Cloud agency.

Working with Commerce Cloud and their agency was:

LAX.com tried everything they could to make Commerce Cloud work for them, but nothing improved the situation.

“We tried patchworking plugins and some custom development,” explained Dlugozim. “We had external developers on a retainer package to help with updates.”

This added to LAX.com’s large monthly fees for Commerce Cloud’s cartridges, making the solution even more expensive, without offering any more control.

“It felt like we were investing money into a system that’s created to pad the pockets of developers at the expense of companies locked into contracts,” said Dlugozim.

As LAX.com continued to grow and evolve their business, they felt Commerce Cloud was not able to evolve alongside them. They knew they had to change.

Ultimately, it was a financial decision that made them look for a new option.

“The trigger was realizing that the cost of staying with Commerce Cloud was greater than the cost of switching,” said Dlugozim.

As soon as they realized this, LAX.com began to search for a lighter, flexible, more cost-effective eCommerce platform that offered them greater control.

LAX knew what they wanted from their new eCommerce platform.

“We developed a detailed RFP and shared multiple discovery calls with MTN before they started work,” said Dlugozim. “MTN really dug in and learned how our existing website flowed, what was working well, and what needed to be improved.”

MTN took what they learned, and developed multiple design drafts for LAX’s new website. Together, they hosted many working sessions to finalize the new website’s desired look and feel before beginning work.

During this phase, LAX and MTN also divided duties for the project.

“We have a small but strong internal technical team, and we wanted to do some of the heavy lifting for data migration on our own,” explained Dlugozim. “For those items, MTN acted as a consultant and guided our team through any questions we had or issues that came up.”

Once LAX defined and approved all requirements, MTN kicked off development.

To do so, MTN followed their Go Live Process, developed over hundreds of deployments. This process contained over 200 items that were broken into three phases:

Throughout all three phases, MTN paid special attention to a couple elements of the project.

The first was data migration. MTN had to perform three separate data migrations. A base migration to build the new site, a second migration leading up to deployment to bring in new data that came in, and a third migration shortly after deployment to manage any delta data. MTN also ensured that LAX’s ERP and other data-dependent systems remained synced.

The second was support. During development, MTN held weekly meetings to share progress, receive feedback, and clear anything that might block the project’s progress. After deployment, they continued to meet with LAX to collect feedback, make changes, and troubleshoot any small, unavoidable issues that may have come up within the new live website.

Overall, MTN and LAX were able to successfully migrate onto Shopify Plus and the new website without any major challenges.

“MTN filled the gaps in our team, and offered the right combination of technical work, project management, and consulting,” said Dlugozim.