Hajduk Web Shop's Winning eCommerce Formation: Magento 2 & Hyvä Football Showcase
Merchant and Magento 2 project snapshot
- URL: shop.hajduk.hr
- Countries: Croatia
- Industry Vertical: Professional Sports Club
- Business Model: B2C online store including ticketing, membership and merchandise, as well as four brick and mortar stores in Croatia
Hyvä Project Scope and Key Results
New Website Launch with Hyvä: February 13, 2024
- 750 SKUs
- Revenue: up by over 99% YoY (2024 vs 2023)
- Desktop Page Speed: 58.45% faster
- Before: 0.662s Time to First Byte
- After: 0.275s Time to First Byte
- Mobile Page Speed: 40% faster
- Before: 0.755s Time to First Byte
- After: 0.450s Time to First Byte
- Carbon Footprint: 48% lower
- Before: 1.62g
- After: 0.84g
- Homepage Page Weight: 65% lighter
- Before: 8.46Mb
- After: 2.96Mb
Client’s Quote:
From the first contact to the launch of the web store, cooperation and understanding with the INCHOO team was at an extremely high level. All our conceptual requests were accepted and implemented in a fast and efficient manner. The project itself carried an exceptional emotional stake for both parties, but the entire project was completed at a highly professional level. Customer journey, membership connection and striking visual dimension were the highlights of our story, and INCHOO delivered them all.”
A Century of Hajduk’s Football Enhanced by Hyvä
Founded in 1911, HNK Hajduk Split is one of Croatia’s most recognisable names - a legendary football club with over a hundred thousand registered fans! The passion and dedication of these loyal fans have kept Hajduk at the heart of Croatian culture for over a century.
In today's digital age, creating a compelling eCommerce solution was essential for Hajduk to connect with its fans.
Winning is important, but anyone who follows football knows what truly matters: the shared sense of community is what ignites the passion. Hajduk needed a simple, community-driven solution for their refreshed web shop. That's where Hyvä came in.
Global Reach and a Fan Focused Digital Strategy
Hajduk operates in the sports merchandise market, targeting fans not just in Croatia, but worldwide. One of the club's key strategies to foster fan interest and loyalty is through its official fan club membership. Members enjoy a range of benefits, including early access to game tickets, exclusive discounts in both web and physical shops, and even a special gift package for babies registered in their first month. Yes, Hajduk fans start early!
Image Source: shop.hajduk.hr
In today’s digital era, having a website that effectively communicates these benefits is crucial to any brand’s marketing strategy. Hajduk had already established a strong online presence, and their next goal was to ensure their new web shop seamlessly aligned with and enhanced this presence.
Scoring with Hyvä: Hajduk's Goals & Tactics
Selecting Hyvä as the frontend theme for Hajduk’s new web shop was a carefully considered decision. Inchoo, with its extensive experience in successful Magento projects, was eager to explore innovative solutions.
What ultimately sealed the decision was the realisation that the performance levels achievable with Hyvä would be challenging, if not impossible, to attain with other solutions. Additionally, Hyvä's growing reputation and the momentum it had built within the eCommerce community made it a compelling choice.
As the project progressed, several key goals emerged:
- Stability: The previous web shop frequently faced instability issues, crashing during high traffic moments, particularly after important games. Ensuring a stable platform that could handle peak traffic was a top priority.
- Enhanced User Experience: Beyond a visual refresh, the project aimed to improve navigation, enhance search functionalities, and integrate seamlessly with the official fan club.
- Content Management: Empowering store administrators with greater content management capabilities was another crucial objective.
- Custom Jersey Personalization: As a standard feature for football clubs, offering custom jersey personalization was a flagship functionality that needed to be seamlessly integrated into the new web shop.
Inchoo's Approach to Hajduk's eCommerce Solution
When Hajduk’s new eCommerce manager reached out to Inchoo, their key issues were the instability of the previous system and crashes during traffic peaks. Inchoo's solution focused on stability, performance, and great UX, using the Hyvä theme exclusively alongside the default Magento checkout.
As this was Inchoo’s first project on Hyvä, the developers faced a learning curve with Tailwind and Alpine.js, which are not part of the default Magento tech stack. However, one of the early benefits they recognised was Hyvä's accessible learning curve, greatly supported by the official Hyvä documentation and the active Slack channel, where the latest and most accurate information about the platform is shared.
As the project progressed, the team grew more confident and comfortable working with Hyvä, validating the widely acclaimed benefits of the platform. Tailwind and Alpine.js made the development process faster and simpler, ensuring that a complete, polished product would be delivered on time.
Hitting the Back of the Net: Hajduk's eCommerce Transformation
Performance and Stability
Following the launch of the new web shop on February 13th, 2024, the goals set at the start of the project were successfully achieved. Since the launch, the store has not experienced any downtime, even during high traffic moments. Hyvä effectively addressed one of Hajduk’s primary concerns, delivering the much-needed stability.
Additionally, Core Web Vitals displayed impressive improvements:
- Homepage speed increased by 58.45%
- Category page speed increased by 63.06%
- Product page speed increased by 42.9%
- SEO results achieved a perfect score of 100!
These enhancements ensured a faster, smoother overall customer experience, eliminating unnecessary loading times and errors, providing end users with a comfortable and reliable shopping journey.
User Experience and Visual Design
The visual refresh of Hajduk’s web shop was another crucial aspect of the project. While top-notch technology is essential, the visual design is equally important for creating a positive first impression.
Key improvements in the visual and user experience included:
- Increased Clarity: The overall readability of text across the web shop was improved, focusing on accessible design.
- Responsive Design: The new design ensured responsiveness across various devices, addressing previous issues with certain resolutions.
- Elimination of Redundant Steps: The redesign automated certain user interactions, such as confirming new items added to the shopping cart, to streamline the shopping process.
- New Features: Introduced features like live search and related products, allowing users to navigate and use the web shop seamlessly.
- Courtesy Navigation: Facilitated easier navigation throughout the Hajduk web sphere.
From a UX standpoint, the new web shop offers a more comfortable, reliable, and attractive experience. This is supported by an increase in average user engagement time, from 2 minutes and 49 seconds to 3 minutes and 34 seconds in the four months following the launch.
Jersey Personalisation
Hajduk provides fans and buyers the opportunity to craft their own custom football jerseys in the official web shop, featuring their name, preferred number, and sponsor club logos – a first in the Hyvä space.
While this feature existed in the previous iteration, the new Hyvä-powered web shop significantly improved it. Clutter was removed, and a visual preview was introduced, allowing customers to see their custom jerseys in advance.
Membership Perks
Special emphasis was placed on integrating member accounts with the new web shop. The redesign more effectively communicated membership perks, such as discounted prices, across the entire web shop.
Reviewing the Playbook: Inchoo’s Learnings from Their First Hyvä Project
The HNK Hajduk project was a strategic milestone for Inchoo. Following this project, they decided to use Hyvä as the starting frontend framework for all new projects. Mastering the Hyvä framework allowed them to deliver new projects with significantly higher efficiency.
Key Tips for Merchants
The Hyvä solution for Hajduk delivered a faster web shop with numerous advantages, including better SEO, higher conversion rates, and a user experience that fosters customer loyalty. For the design team, using the Hyvä UI kit as a guideline significantly alleviated their workload. This allowed the team to focus on thoroughly polishing the web shop’s visual identity and user experience rather than worrying about developing every element from scratch.
Inchoo has already committed to using Hyvä on multiple current projects. Due to Hyvä’s nature as a frontend theme, all previously developed backend modules can still function without issues, aside from some additional compatibility work. The current Magento solution for checkouts is overly slow and complex, resulting in poor customer experience. In the future we are especially excited to put the Hyvä Checkout module into action.”
Getting started with Hyvä was a step out of their comfort zone, but one that paid off for both the client and the agency. There’s a learning curve to any new skill, so don’t be anxious about taking the leap with Hyvä. The end result was less complexity in the development process for all parties involved - something every developer and client strives for!
About Inchoo
Based in Osijek, Croatia, Inchoo is an eCommerce agency with over 15 years of experience and more than 500 successful projects worldwide. Their vision is to be a merchant’s best friend - with that principle in mind, they understand that every successful relationship demands a unique approach. Combining web design, development, digital marketing, and consulting services aligned with a culture based on excellence, integrity, and passion, Inchoo prepares and executes high-performing eCommerce strategies. With their recent ventures into Hyvä, they are more excited than ever about their future projects.
Agency’s Quote
I was born the day after HNK Hajduk Split won their last Yugoslav championship title. That was 1979. Despite my mother's objections, my father was in Sarajevo at that crucial championship match. He heard of my arrival when he got home and stepped out of the train wearing a Hajduk scarf. Now, a few decades later, I am happy and proud to have contributed with my team to take the club a step further in the eCommerce business. Happy 113th birthday Hajduk!
From a technical standpoint, this is an innovation at Inchoo. This is our first project using the Hyvä frontend framework.”
