Mizuno Launches Site With BigCommerce

Mizuno, the athletic apparel, equipment and footwear brand, has tapped BigCommerce to create and launch a new website on the tech company’s platform.

Mizuno partnered with BigCommerce because it was aiming to future-proof its business “by employing an innovative composable commerce approach with a customized tech stack while still delivering a significant cost reduction,” the companies said in a joint statement. Mizuno’s new site includes integrations with Deck Commerce for order management functions and Bolt Commerce for checkout. Mira Commerce was the lead on the construction of the site.

Casey Rodriguez, direct-to-consumer manager at Mizuno USA, said the brand’s go-to-market (GTM) strategies have shifted in recent years. “We really needed to make sure that those new objectives aligned with our infrastructure,” Rodriguez said. “Modernizing our e-commerce platform has enabled Mizuno USA to enhance our customer experience, respond more effectively to market demands, and support ongoing growth and innovation in the competitive global athletic apparel market. We’ve already seen an increase in average order value by 12 percent.”

Switching to BigCommerce enabled improvements in three key areas for Mizuno USA.

The new site offers greater flexibility. BigCommerce said that adopting a composable commerce framework ensures Mizuno “that technology services and custom functionality can be updated and replaced with minimal risk to the overall system.” In addition, accessing a continually expanding app marketplace “has allowed for quick, low-cost experimentation with adding new features and services that prove to help growth,” the company said.

Mizuno’s site also allows for real-time product availability. BigCommerce said moving from scheduled updates to real-time product availability improve the accuracy of product listings. And by streamlining the path-to-purchase process and integrating Bolt Commerce’s one-click checkout has reduced the time for customers to complete the checkout process by 90 percent,” BigCommerce said.

“The thing that sticks out most for me is how we streamlined our checkout process,” Rodriguez said. “Implementing Bolt and offering a basically seamless checkout experience to our customers has been a game changer for us.”

Mizuno’s marketing team said it has experienced a 40 percent decrease in time to deploy site content and marketing campaigns, thereby “creating more operational capacity without the need to increase operational expenses,” the company said.

The brand noted that its previous e-commerce stack had limited core functionality “and a closed architecture that required significant investment to integrate third-party services and add new features. The absence of an active app marketplace further made it difficult to add new functionality to their site to keep pace with competitors and meet customer expectations.” It was also costly and time-consuming to run.

Al Williams, general manager of B2C at BigCommerce, said, “With an eye on the future and scalability, Mizuno USA took an innovative composable approach to their digital architecture that will deliver flexibility and agility to keep up with the needs of their customer no matter how the business needs to shift. Working with our great partners at Mira Commerce and leveraging our open platform, Mizuno USA now has a beautiful site that delivers engaging customer experiences and improved performance that scales for the future.”

Mira Commerce said it was able to quickly design and develop custom apps using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company said custom apps and microservices provided new site functionality for the Mizuno site, “as well as processes that enabled real-time and near real-time data flows between Mizuno USA’s legacy backend systems and other core digital commerce systems and third-party services.”

Sergei Ostapenko, chief executive officer of Mira Commerce, said Mizuno was using “a monolithic legacy solution that was heavily customized over the years, and that made innovation challenging. It limited the ability to experiment, try new things, or run necessary campaigns. They needed a tech stack that balanced form, function and performance, and BigCommerce’s composable solution was the perfect fit.”