Hole19

Expanding into commerce with a D2C marketplace

Chris Somerton, Head of eCommerce at Hole19, says that the business is expanding into commerce to diversify its business and create additional revenue streams with the audience that already uses Hole19.

“Millions of people use our app, and we know a ton about their golfing lives,” says Chris. “We want to deploy that user information to create enhanced digital experiences that improve the lives of golfers, and a personalized online marketplace is a central part of that strategy.”

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Chris says that launching a D2C marketplace provides value for Hole19’s users and for brands that manufacture golf apparel and equipment.

• Hole19 users get personalized product recommendations based on their actual golfing behavior.
• Brands that manufacture golf apparel and equipment improve their profit margins by breaking free of an archaic wholesale model in which they cede merchandising and pricing power to big retailers. When brands sell wholesale, big retailers have to keep stock, which may be heavily discounted because of bad weather or seasonality. Hole19 doesn’t keep stock, which means that brand sellers get to sell their individual products at their preferred price.

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Despite the apparent value, Hole19 had challenges and considerations in launching a D2C marketplace – in particular, earning seller brands’ trust to allow Hole19 to facilitate a portion of their commerce.

1. This D2C marketplace is a totally new business model for golf, which has traditionally been dominated by wholesaling and physical retail locations. Chris says that many big golf brands still don’t even sell D2C themselves. Getting seller brands on board and interested in a marketplace model would require removing all and any barriers to entry.
2. Seller brands in golf have limited resources, and won’t join a marketplace that takes weeks or months to integrate with.
3. Hole19 is a 40 person company and didn’t have the resources to build a marketplace on their own. Hole19’s leadership also felt wary about a huge upfront investment on a concept that hadn’t yet been proven in golf.
4. Hole19 wanted the flexibility to make changes to its commerce tech stack if and when it launched in new markets or learned more about user behavior. Chris and his team wanted a solution that was highly flexible and would enable them to shift as they learned.

Opting for a truly composable architecture to power the Hole19 marketplace

With the knowledge that they needed a flexible, scalable commerce solution that met seller brands’ needs and could deliver data-driven personalization to shoppers, Hole19 evaluated commerce architectures. They quickly decided on a composable commerce approach.

Chris says that Hole19 opted for composable commerce architecture because of the “blend” of benefits it provided:

1. Being able to select the best available technology and components to power commerce
2. The belief that a flexible, composable architecture meant faster onboarding and easier integrations for seller brands and better shopping experiences for Hole19 users.
3. The ability to grow, expand, and iterate the commerce solution over time – without being locked into today’s decisions.

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Selecting Elastic Path

Deciding on a composable commerce approach to step one. Next came what Chris says was an intense, rigorous evaluation of commerce providers. Over time, it became clear to Chris and his team that Elastic Path was the only platform that could meet Hole19’s needs.

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Chris says his team had two overarching questions throughout the selection process:

1. Does it fit our commercial needs and budget? Some commerce platforms required millions of dollars of commerce investment up front. Hole19 didn’t want to make a seven figure investment from the outset, and wanted further technical investment to be tied to data-backed commerce successes.
2. Can our seller brands integrate with the platform? Hole19 couldn’t get seller brands to sign up if integration was hard, and seller brands use a range of commerce platforms themselves. Whatever platform was chosen had to have simple, powerful APIs and the ability to handle data normalization so that each seller brand’s products and payments and commissions information imported correctly after integrating with the Hole19 marketplace.

Elastic Path was the only commerce solution that gave Hole19’s team a resounding yes to both questions. Commercial needs and budget would be respected, and the challenges of seller brand integration and data normalization could be addressed with ease.

Chris says his team also felt confident about Elastic Path’s ability to serve as the “glue” of a best-of-breed tech stack that is purpose built for Hole19’s needs. In particular, Hole19 knew they needed a strong marketplace facilitator tool, a top search and personalization vendor, email and CRM, and a no-code frontend that could handle reams of complex, multi-brand backend data.

Getting an innovative composable solution live with support from Elastic Path

With Elastic Path at the center of its solution, Hole19 launched golf’s first and only multi-brand D2C marketplace.

The Hole19 tech stack includes:

• The full Elastic Path platform, which boosts conversions and revenue by empowering merchandisers and making composable orchestration fast, simple, and stress-free. Hole19 uses Elastic Path for…
  • A no-code frontend
  • Merchandiser-friendly PIM and catalog management
  • A commerce-intelligent iPaaS for composable orchestration
  • A payment processing solution powered by Stripe.
• A marketplace facilitator tool, so that seller brands don’t have to make any changes to their backend of commerce operations. The facilitator tool normalizes data, and then product information is delivered through Elastic Path’s platform.
• A product recommendations and personalization tool that surfaces dynamic merchandising content based on past user behavior.
• SendGrid as a CRM and for transactional emails that are fed from frontend events, like active shopping, browning, cart abandonment, and more.
• Klaviyo as an additional email tool tied to frontend events.
• Algolia for site search.

Elastic Path powers Hole19’s tech stack, and Chris says that Elastic Path’s support and expertise has made it possible to turn that tech stack into a cohesive solution that Hole19 could implement with ease. In particular, Chris points to the Elastic Path Global Services team as a critical pillar of support.

“We have an incredible team of engineers and developers, but we couldn’t have built a product this complicated in-house without spending years of development and gobs of money,” Chris says. “Getting our marketplace live has only been viable with the support of Elastic Path, especially the Global Services team.”

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Chris says the result of strong partnership with the Elastic Path Global Services team is clear: 35 seller brands live on Hole19’s marketplace in less than six months of operation.

“For a new business model in our industry, that’s a remarkable achievement, and it shows that brands trust us,” Chris says. “We couldn’t have built that trust or launched our marketplace without a composable architecture from Elastic Path.”

Delivering on speed, quality, and merchandising power day-to-day with Elastic Path

Chris says that Hole19’s ambition for speed and quality in their commerce is realized every day that he and his team work in Elastic Path.

The first point of speed is seller brand onboarding. Compared to Chris’s previous retail and marketplace experiences, onboarding at Hole19 is lightning fast for seller brands, with the actual integration to the marketplace typically taking five to 10 minutes.

Opting for Elastic Path Studio as a frontend also means that Hole19 can make merchandising fast and without reliance on developers or IT. Even Chris, who is admittedly “non-technical,” can make changes fast and without fear of breaking anything.

“Moving fast and making modifications to our frontend easily and with as little developer input as possible is key for us,” Chris says. “With Elastic Path, merchandising changes are so simple that I can do it in minutes, which is a good barometer of the velocity in which we can move.”

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Over time, Chris expects Elastic Path to empower Hole19’s internal team of UX designers, product owners, developers and more to take more hands-on commerce responsibility. The strong documentation available gives Chris confidence that they’ll learn the Elastic Path platform quickly, and be able to start adding value fast.

Another place where the speed and quality of Elastic Path manifests is Hole19’s storefront site performance. In fact, according to our Storefront Grader™, Hole19’s online store boats performance metrics like:

• A 1.23 site speed index, which is 3X faster than Google’s benchmark for a “fast” site
• A 0.002 cumulative layout shift, which is 5,000% better than the recommended benchmark of 0.1
• An A grade for SEO performance, indicating a fully-performant, SEO-optimized site

Ambitions for a revolutionary in-app commerce experience

Hole19’s commerce ambitions extend beyond the online storefront the marketplace is currently hosted on. In the future, Hole19 wants to operationalize its extraordinary customer data and offer in-app commerce experiences when players are out on the course.

“What sets us apart is that we know our customers and their behavior better than anyone else,” Chris says. “ We know how many golf balls they’ve lost, how many rounds they’ve played, whether they only play when it’s warm, and so much more. Our in-app, trigger-based experiences will identify the right customer with the right product at the exact moment that they’re ready to make a purchase, which is a revolutionary proposition.”

In the future, Hole19 users will be served in-app experiences when it’s likely they need a new ball, or fresh polo shirt, or even an umbrella or rain gear. This elevated commerce fits into Hole19’s broader mission of creating enhanced digital experiences that improve the lives of golfers.

Chris says that broadly, Hole19’s goal of enhanced digital experiences is best served by a composable architecture. He recommends that brands considering composable commerce or digital improvements generally pick a tech architecture and solutions that reflect the experiences they want to bring to life – without preemptively compromising.

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