Hunting & Fishing

Hunting & Fishing's product data was across a range of different media sources with no single source of truth beyond a skeleton SKU library. It was key as part of this project to streamline and provide a platform that would allow Hunting & Fishing to collate these data points and provide a jumping point for Hunting & Fishing to require suppliers' to enter product data on their behalf.

The solution was to implement Akeneo Open Source as the PIM solution best suited for a Magento 1 migration and an Adobe Commerce Cloud integration. This allowed Hunting & Fishing to leverage the feature set available as part of this PIM to create a single source of truth for product data which had been sorely lacking. This allowed the digital, in-store and print teams to share consistent product data and capture any content that is created for any of the media touch points.

Hunting & Fishing sell firearms and related accessories in-store as well as very bulky products such as tents and cabinets. One of the key challenges of this build was presenting dangerous goods online in a way that advertises that Hunting & Fishing provides these products but restricts their purchasing online.

Overdose. architectured a two-phased approach to product restrictions: shipping and purchasing restrictions. Either function could be used independently of the other. Shipping restrictions allowed Hunting & Fishing to flag (through Akeneo) if a product should not be available for Delivery and/or Click & Collect because the product is oversized or a special order product which would communicate this throughout the customer journey online. Purchasing restrictions allowed for staff to flag if a product should not be available without staff supervision and booking a viewing session for products such as firearms which require a valid license to be sighted and specific approvals to be made before a purchase can be completed. This separation allowed for flexibility in selling dangerous goods or their accessories, as well as oversized goods, through their online presence while still abiding by legal restrictions.

For the majority of outdoor hobbies that Hunting & Fishing provide products and services for, there is a set of necessary products that should be purchased together to get the optimal set-up such as fishing rods, lines, sinkers, and hooks being purchased in a single delivery to the customer. This is easily communicated in-store with a staff member walking a customer through this process, but the challenge was to communicate this experience online.

The multi-phased approach to this challenge was dedicating massive resources to improving the product data available online (including improving product filters), allowing for product labels to be applied to a product on the product listings and detailed pages to communicate the technical best-case uses for a product (such as whether a rod was best used for Surf or Canal Fishing), and focusing on dedicated cross-sell opportunities above the fold for the required accessories that are usually missed by hobbyists.

Due to Hunting & Fishing's technical and extensive product range, one of the key challenges for this project was ensuring that customers knew what was available in their nearest store, where their nearest store was, and what benefits they could get from going in-store for their order.

Users are communicated with throughout their journey when they share their location or postcode with the website on accurate in-store stock levels as well as providing the new in-store and Click & Collect delivery options which are advertised consistently throughout the site. By allowing users to select their store in the header of the site, they have tailored results of what is available in their selected store. They are also prompted to enter their details on the product page when reaching the end of their research journey, and then allow to check in-store availability in their region.