FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Peter Whitney
Project Manager, ecom enterprises, inc.
Phone: 408-720-9194
FAX: 408-720-9195
E-mail: info@ecomenterprises.com
PDF: Case Study
Fox Racing drives new sales and increases web orders from 5% to 50% with a B2B Ecommerce website created with Adobe® Flex® and ColdFusion®
Sunnyvale, CA, May 23rd, 2009 - Founded in 1974, Fox Racing is best known for motocross apparel emblazoned with its iconic fox head logo. The company also makes mountain bike apparel, lifestyle clothing, eyewear, and footwear, all sold through sporting goods and cycle shops nationwide and its fashion clothing through the Fox flagship retail clothing store in Santa Clara, California.
A need for speed with dealer orders
To place orders, dealers—more than 3,000 in the United States alone—were using faxes and phone calls. Fox customer service personnel manually keyed in orders to the company’s order-processing system. Many faxed orders required follow-up phone calls to verify information. The labor-intensive ordering process caused phone center costs to soar, and hindered potential growth because orders could only be placed during daily operating hours./P>
To add to the challenge, it was difficult for sales reps to share product images and educate dealers on seasonal product promotions. Sales reps relied primarily on printed materials distributed to dealers within their territories, which soon became out of date. Printing and distributing materials was also an expensive, inefficient way for the company to promote its wares. With more than 22 seasonal launches each year, Fox Racing wanted to create a centralized, online source of information for its sales reps and dealers.
According to Greg Fox, Vice President of Sales for the family business, “Our course was clear: we needed to make it easier for sales reps to showcase new product lines, as well as converting sales reps and dealers to an automated, online ordering process.”
Enter Web 2.0 - Rich Internet Application
Fox Racing turned to ecom enterprises, a web development and custom web application design company, to develop a solution to the problem. ecom and Fox created a business-to-business ecommerce website that makes it simple for sales reps and dealers to access product and promotional information, and to place orders online. The site interface is built entirely in Adobe Flex, with Adobe ColdFusion powering the back-end and providing connectivity between the company’s database and the service layer of the application. In addition, ecom is working with Fox Racing to develop a new collaborative Adobe AIR® application that will enable dealers to pre-order the next season’s line, an effective strategy in retail sales.
“Adobe’s rich Internet application development tools were a natural fit for this project,” says Troy Shumaker, CTO for ecom enterprises. “Adobe Flex allowed for fast page refresh and superior speed with product images, while ColdFusion provided a cost-effective, fast, and easy way to create and deliver the application.”
A high-performance application for a high-performance lineup of products
The simple, effective user interface of the portal is fully personalized for each dealer. At a glance, dealers can see what inventory is available in the warehouse, view new offerings through online catalogs, and place orders automatically. The self-service environment is available around the clock, making it easier for dealers to conduct business with the company any time of the day or night. Sales reps can place orders on behalf of dealers, and can easily share product images and promotional materials online, without having to meet with dealers in person to deliver printed materials.
The business benefits of the new application speak for themselves. The company reduced phone center costs by one-third in the first six months of deploying the new application. The average size and the volume of web orders have both been increasing exponentially, and the ability for dealers to order any time of the day or night is encouraging an overall increase in sales. Web-based orders previously comprised only about 5% of total sales. Since the project launched, web-based orders have surpassed 50% of sales, with thousands of transactions in the first few months. Because of the high volume of automated orders, operational costs have been reduced substantially.
“The results of deploying our application created using Adobe Flex and ColdFusion are nothing short of incredible,” says Fox. “I am impressed that our online sales have increased ten-fold and how quickly we’ve reduced operational costs now that we are having key orders processed via the web.”
###
