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Industry: Sports & Outdoors Solution: Dynamic Imaging, eVideo  Challenges:
Summit Sports, Inc., a Michigan-based retailer that has been in the sporting goods industry since 1990, launched its online arm in 1997 to offer the public the most comprehensive and helpful sporting goods website imaginable. From skis to inline skates, Summit Sports' sites feature the products its customers are looking for, but are also filled with articles, blogs, guides, and videos relating to sporting goods equipment and apparel. Summit Sports takes a tremendous amount of pride in making the online shopping experience personal and helpful because it wants customers to feel like they've just walked into a retail store. Best Practices: Unlike other merchants, online purveyors of sports equipment face quite a bit more scrutiny by their shoppers. Sports equipment isn't inexpensive, and shoppers, while willing to pay for their desired product, must first know if the product is exactly what they are looking for. Summit Sports was eager to improve its online experience and "make their customers feel like they'd just walked into a retail store." The company reached out to Adobe Scene7 to address its customer experience concerns across its 13 web properties. The sites were lacking rich product detail, and the legacy product imagery was largely static. A big part of the problem, and reason for the lack of rich media, was attributed to bandwidth issues that surfaced when Summit Sports rolled out 13 websites within a fairly short timeframe, increasing the number of product images significantly. The Scene7 hosted rich media platform afforded Summit Sports the flexibility to improve its customer experience by providing customers with multiple product images, all color options, and the ability to interactively zoom in on product details as well as videos without becoming burdened by the hosting, rendering, or serving of their rich media. In partnering with Scene7, Summit was quickly able to boost the number of images supporting each product, while concurrently being relieved from having to maintain those images. Scene7 eliminated the need to generate, store, manage, and reference multiple sized versions of the same image by dynamically generating all images on-the-fly in any size, color, crop, or resolution, which has saved Summit Sports significant production and operational costs and dramatically shortened the time it takes to refresh its websites. Now customers can see multiples views of a product—front, back, side, even inside!—and zoom in on the details enabling them to feel like they are viewing the product in the same way that they would in a store. Summit took their desire for an enhanced customer experience a step further by tapping the Scene7 rich media platform to host and serve video to complement its rich product imagery. The company first launched product review videos three years ago where it would test equipment from the manufacturers before it became available for sale. Summit Sports continues to do this, but has also augmented these videos with tutorial videos on individual products and how to buy equipment as well as "On-Snow Reviews." The company now features more than 1500 videos on its sites. Summit Sports does not separate the video component from other online investments, but overall has experienced significant growth and found that using the Scene7 video solution has helped the company increase sales. Before partnering with Scene7, Summit Sports had to manage all of its images in-house and host them on local production servers. Video wasn’t even an option then! Using Scene7 to host and publish its rich media has enabled the company to offer shoppers an experience as close to shopping in a retail store as possible while freeing up valuable internal processing and web serving resources. "All of the staff at Scene7 have been very accommodating to our needs during implementation and continue to provide strong support in our post production environment. In short, they have been very professional and a pleasure to work with," said Dennis Kopitz, Web Development Director, Summit Sports, Inc. Results:
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“All of the staff at Scene7 have been very accommodating to our needs during implementation and continue to provide strong support in our post production environment. In short, they have been very professional and a pleasure to work with.” |
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