“If you want all the bells and whistles of an elite product with simplified, easy implementation and a robust support team, you really can’t get any better than Searchspring.”

Joe Macias
Director of Digital Marketing & Ecommerce, MonkeySports

The Brand

Founded in 1999, MonkeySports started out as a small hockey store in California. After initially venturing into ecommerce with HockeyMonkey.com, the business now has multiple sites specializing in baseball, lacrosse, and team sports, as well as a number of superstore locations across North America.

“The majority of our products are what we call hard goods,” says Ki Song, Director of Ecommerce Development. “We focus on the actual equipment you use to play specific sports, as opposed to more general sporting apparel. And instead of selling products for every sport out there, we deal with a smaller, niche set of products.” 

The Challenges

Problems arising from a platform migration led the MonkeySports team to seek out a new search solution for their ecommerce stores. “We had replatformed from Magento 1 to 2 while using Klevu and we just couldn’t get our feed spec right. The data was never in a place where it was usable for search,” says Joe Macias, Director of Digital Marketing & Ecommerce. 

“Some products would appear when we didn’t expect them to display, while other products were missing from results. It was guesswork as to why products were or weren’t showing as expected,” added Ki.  

Data issues were exacerbated by delayed response times from off-shore support. “We were operating 8-10 hours apart from Klevu’s support team, so any time we sent them something, we wouldn’t hear back until the next day.”

The MonkeySports team developed workarounds in order to get search results live, but noticed design issues on the front end of their site as a result. “It was always irritating knowing that there was a discrepancy in the theming,” says Joe. 

The Solutions

Following recommendations from other ecommerce retailers, MonkeySports decided to implement Searchspring to address their search and data challenges. “One of the key differences that we appreciate with Searchspring is that the Magento module simplifies all of those data issues. It eliminates a party from the process and the module just does exactly what it’s supposed to do,” says Joe. 

“We went from signing the contract to going live on a production site in about 4-6 weeks, which was key during our busy season. We also really liked that Searchspring created a Slack channel for us during that integration so we could have real-time communication in the process,” says Ki. 

Previous design and control issues were also addressed as part of the integration. “Searchspring is able to replicate our category layouts, even going so far as to calculate where and when to avoid showing comparison pricing. Badges are more closely aligned to our category pages, as well. Knowing Searchspring is able to replicate our theming has been very welcome,” says Joe. 

“With the Searchspring dashboard, we can see exactly why different products are triggered to show in search results, and add merchandising rules to boost certain products, categories, or brands when we need to. We have a lot more control now,” says Ki.  

While MonkeySports is currently focused on search, the team has plans to leverage other Searchspring tools in future campaigns. “We think it will be better, easier, and faster for us to create landing pages through Searchspring. Being able to do that without the complicated native Magento workflows will be critical,” says Ki. 

The Results

“We used to regularly get questions from our customer service team, asking why products were displaying in the wrong place or not showing up at all. Since we switched over to Searchspring, I haven’t heard of those types of complaints coming in from customers,” says Ki. 

In the first full month following Searchspring integration, an average of 8% of shoppers on the HockeyMonkey, BaseballMonkey, GoalieMonkey, and LacrosseMonkey sites used search.