Sports Apparel · nopCommerce
One Platform for Team Stores, Bulk B2B Orders and the Factory Floor
Project Snapshot
- Client : Pro Athletics, a California-based sports apparel leader
- Industry : Retail, distribution and e-commerce
- Scope : Unified storefront and admin, team stores, B2B ordering, production integration, quoting and reporting
- Platforms : Web
- Technologies : nopCommerce, replacing a .NET back office and a Shopify storefront
- Headline result : 5× monthly order growth after migration
The Impact
5×
Monthly order growth after moving to the unified platform
One platform
Admin and storefront consolidated, cutting maintenance cost
Excel to order
Bulk B2B ordering by spreadsheet upload
TPV-gated
Every order aligned with production before it can progress
Overview
Pro Athletics sells sports apparel to teams, businesses and individuals, and every one of those customers buys differently. The company was running the business on two systems that did not agree with each other, and three groups paid for it:
- teams, who wanted a branded store of their own with jersey numbers and bundles,
- B2B buyers and the CSRs serving them, placing bulk orders by hand, and
- the factory, receiving orders without the Tech Pack Variables production actually needs.
The back office lived in .NET and the storefront in Shopify. Every process that had to cross that line — quotes, bulk orders, production tracking, reporting — was manual, and manual does not scale to a company growing this fast.
Brain Station 23 implemented a customised nopCommerce platform with a single admin and storefront, then built the apparel-specific machinery on top: team stores, CSR-assisted ordering, Excel-based B2B upload, TPV gating, bundling and quoting.
Monthly orders grew five-fold after the migration, on a platform that costs less to maintain than the two it replaced.
Business Challenges
Apparel commerce looks like ordinary e-commerce until you reach the order: a team jersey is a product, a number, a size run, a bundle and a production spec at once. Off-the-shelf storefronts stop at the first of those.
Eight pressures shaped the build.
- Systems were disjointed. Back-office operations in .NET and a customer-facing Shopify storefront created inefficiency everywhere they met.
- The order lifecycle was complex. Apparel production required integrating factory workflow and Tech Pack Variables into the order itself.
- B2B support was limited. Manual processes made bulk ordering and B2B customer service slow.
- There were no team stores. Customers needed branded storefronts with their own products and bundles, and the platform could not provide them.
- Fulfilment was manual. Without automation, the order process could not scale with demand.
- Bundling and customisation were constrained. Uniform-based ordering needed a better experience and more functional flexibility than the storefront offered.
- There was no quotation system. Quote requests and the CSR workflow behind them had no home.
- Reporting was limited. Sales, team-store and logistics reporting had to be tied to actual operations, and was not.
Almost every item is a symptom of the first. Two platforms meant every apparel-specific feature had to be built twice or not at all — so it was not at all.
Storefront and back office not talking?
Bring it to a 30-minute call — we will come back with an architecture and a scoped estimate.
What We Built
The build consolidates first, then adds the features a sports-apparel business needs and a generic storefront does not: team stores, assisted and bulk ordering, production alignment, bundling, quoting and reporting.
A unified nopCommerce platform
A single admin and storefront replaced the .NET-plus-Shopify split, reducing maintenance and giving every feature that followed one place to live.
A team store plugin
Branded, team-specific stores with unique URLs, catalogues and order histories, so a school or club gets its own shop without Pro Athletics running a separate site.
A custom order manager
Team-based order fulfilment and production tracking in one flow, replacing the manual coordination that could not scale.
CSR-assisted ordering
Sales reps place and manage customer orders through a custom lifecycle, which is how B2B service moved from email threads into the platform.
Excel-based B2B ordering
Business clients bulk-upload orders from spreadsheets tailored to how they already work, removing line-by-line entry.
Tech Pack Variable integration
Mandatory TPV input is enforced before an order can progress, so production receives what it needs the first time.
Product bundling and uniform UX
Grouped product packages speed up purchase and lift conversion, with apparel-specific features such as jersey number selection built into the flow.
Quotation and reporting
Quotes are generated from the storefront and routed to CSRs for processing, and dashboards cover order tracking, team sales, bundles and production insight.
The Results
The outcomes span the whole chain: how many orders come in, what it costs to run the platform, and whether the factory gets what it needs.
Growth and cost
Monthly orders grew 5× after migrating to the new platform, while consolidating two systems into one optimised maintenance cost. Bulk ordering functionality increased B2B sales directly, because the customers who buy most now have a channel built for how they buy.
Operations and experience
Streamlined CSR workflows improved order speed and customer service. TPV validation and automated delivery scheduling enhanced coordination with the factory, UX upgrades and team-specific shopping flows improved the customer experience, and robust reporting gave the business operational insight to make decisions on.
The transferable lesson is that consolidation was the enabling move, not the goal. Nothing on the list — team stores, TPV gating, Excel ordering — was buildable while the business straddled two platforms.
The TPV gate is the detail worth stealing. Refusing to let an order progress without its production spec is a small rule that removes an entire class of factory errors.
Selling products that are also production specs?
You might be running a storefront and a back office that do not talk, taking bulk orders by hand, or sending the factory orders it has to query. In every case, the first step is the same.
Book a 30-minute call with Brain Station 23. Bring your order types and the systems behind them, and we will come back with a proposed architecture, a delivery plan and a scoped estimate.
Storefront and back office not talking?
Bring it to a 30-minute call — we will come back with an architecture and a scoped estimate.
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