Nike E-Commerce

Client: Nike Australia
Launch: August 2013
URL: www.nikestore.com.au

This project started in late 2012, shortly after I finished up on Movember 2012, and to be honest, it was not my normal kind of project; essentially a job to replicate an existing website, in this case the US Nike e-commerce store, and build it on a different platform, Magento e-commerce. There were a few changes and modifications Nike Australia wanted to make, but essentially that was it – this was an engineering and production challenge whereas my preference is always to work on new designs and solutions. That’s not to say this was not an interesting project, or that I wasn’t up for the challenge of making it happen.

We quickly realised that the US version of the website, dubbed the ‘Nike One’ design, was developed for Adobe’s CQ5 and would not be able to provide us workable front-end fragments from which to build our UI – this would need to be redeveloped from scratch, no small undertaking as this design is responsive to both desktop and tablet, with a separate site for mobile users – we knew early on that would be a big front-end job.

The site would also make full use of some interesting technology partners, Product search specialists, SLi, recommendations engine Baynote, user reviews Bazaarvoice and delivery experts Temando, and all hosted on AWS. Overall this mix of technologies combined well to make a website easily the equal of it’s big brother in the States.

In the end multiples staff changes at IE led to a difficult production, especially in terms of that complex front-end build and ultimately the project over-ran – even I had to handover the final delivery of the site so that I could switch back to Movember 2013, which by that time was heading into full production mode.

 However, the site is live now and, importantly, sales are up and the feedback has been universally positive.