Swire Resources grows e-commerce presence in Hong Kong with Adobe Commerce

Image source: Swire Resources.

Even as the overall fashion industry struggled as a result of the logistical and economic shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, one category has thrived: sportswear. According to the McKinsey State of Fashion 2022 report, sportswear companies saw 42 percent positive economic growth with particularly strong performance in China.

Swire Resources is a leading sportswear player in Hong Kong and mainland China. The company represents a wide range of sports, lifestyle and outdoor brands, including Arena, Speedo, Columbia, Chevignon, Teva, Cath Kidston, Crocs, UGG, and Havaianas. In Hong Kong, the company is a leading sports retailer, particularly through its Marathon Sports, GigaSports, and Catalog retail stores. While the company’s retail operations had thrived for decades, several years ago Swire Resources made the decision to go online.

“We realized that digital channels were becoming increasingly important,” says Kelvin So, general manager of IT at Swire Resources. “We needed to establish our own e-commerce operations if we wanted to stay ahead of the competition.”

After working with Magento Open Source for several years, Swire Resources recently upgraded to Adobe Commerce for a more scalable, enterprise e-commerce experience. Switching to Adobe Commerce helped Swire Resources with significant sales growth due to how it has helped improve the customer experience.

Two retailers, one platform

With Adobe Commerce, Swire Resources brought its Marathon Sports and Catalog e-commerce sites onto one single platform. There is one shared shopping cart, which allows consumers to purchase products from both retailers at the same time. Integrated search means if shoppers cannot find the gear that they are looking for at one site, they are directed to products on the other site.

This is particularly helpful as the products carried by Marathon Sports and Catalog tend to slightly overlap on some assortments. Imagine that a customer searches the Catalog site for some brightly colored sneakers they saw online. But those sneakers are actually considered high-performance running shoes carried by Marathon Sports. The Catalog site displays search options from Marathon Sports, directing shoppers to the right product no matter which site they are visiting at the time.

Unified customer profile

Catalog and Marathon Sports customers already enjoyed an integrated loyalty program and mobile app that they used when shopping in the brands’ retail stores. However, the loyalty program did not extend to the e-commerce sites in the past. Now that both Marathon Sports and Catalog are running on the same Adobe Commerce instance, which is integrated with the company’s CRM, the loyalty program can now extend to cover both e-commerce sites. Purchases from either e-commerce site can earn points for the same loyalty account. When shoppers have enough points, they can use points for coupon redemptions for either retailer.

Fast e-commerce performance

Rather than running a single instance of Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce runs on a scalable infrastructure supported by AWS. This leads to much faster response times with less risk of overloading the e-commerce sites. Shoppers can get faster searches, faster page loads, and overall smoother and better shopping experiences.

Record growth

With Adobe Commerce, Swire Resources integrated many of its logistical systems into the e-commerce site. This means that orders are automatically passed on to fulfilment and delivery teams with minimal delays, ultimately getting products into customers’ hands faster.

“In the nine months after migrating Marathon Sports and Catalog to Adobe Commerce, online sales have been growing substantially and we saw a 50 percent growth in loyalty membership,” says So. “Part of the growth can be attributed to our new site design with better UX/UI, but it’s also a result of increased cross-selling, smoother checkout, and faster website response from Adobe Commerce.”

Learn more about how Swire Resources is working with Adobe Commerce.