How Pro4mance Built an Online Community For Athletes

Pro4mance is an Australian sports nutrition company that specializes in manufacturing products specifically for athletic endurance. The company was founded to bring athletes research-backed, Australian-made products at the highest quality, and at competitive prices that could not be found in retail outlets.

The Pro4mance range of sports nutrition products includes several flavors and styles of powdered drinks and gels. The products are simple to use, and complement each other before, during, and after endurance sports.

According to CEO Andrew Jacobs, Pro4mance is about more than the products:

We aimed to change the endurance sports nutrition industry. We didn’t just want to make products and sell them — we wanted to build a community for athletes, who could interact and benefit from using a product range that was specifically developed for endurance sports.

The website was designed and built by the Australian agency Online Store Guys, who have become local experts in the utilization of WooCommerce. The site uses a highly customized design with our Storefront theme as its framework.

Read on to learn more about how Online Store Guys helped Pro4mance create a store suited to their specific needs.

Online Store Guys designer and developer Mike Halligan estimates that he’s built around 25 WooCommerce websites since version 1.0 was released. While the agency has used Canvas for previous projects, the agency chose to work with Storefront for this particular project due to its custom capabilities and fast speed.

“When you’re building bigger sites especially,” said Mike, “you want to make sure that you’re not weighing them down with anything unnecessary. Every millisecond counts for your buyer, so we moved to working with Storefront. This allowed us to maintain the speed of development that Canvas offered, but without bloating our stores.”

Sounds perfect for a store tailored toward athletes, right?

Under the hood, Pro4mance takes full advantage of WooCommerce’s power and flexibility. The store uses an affiliate program, a wholesale system that allows stores to log in and place orders, automated emails unique to customers’ purchasing habits, and target upselling in the shopping cart.

“We use a lot of WooCommerce extensions as a base and then customise them to the project,” said Mike. This allowed Pro4mance to receive a storefront that was completely tailored to their needs, location, and target audience, rather than being limited by another platform.

According to Mike, cost-effectiveness was another reason WooCommerce was perfect for this project:

I’ve got clients that are used to Magento and some higher-end systems, and have to pay many thousands of dollars for even basic customization. You just can’t beat the large variety of capabilities of WooCommerce for such a cost-effective platform.

The option to customize both themes and extensions also saved both the agency and Pro4mance money. “This means that we can build sites that might cost a few hundred thousand dollars on larger platforms for a fraction of the cost,” Mike told us.

Andrew felt that the choice of WooCommerce helped in other ways as well. “WooCommerce has streamlined our business and enabled us to focus our time on other key aspects of the business. We have all the data and statistics we need to plan our marketing and sales campaigns, and continue to improve our customer experience.”

Using WooCommerce allows us to control and manage the everyday running of the website from online sales to product updates to promotions, simply and quickly, with minimal technical knowledge of how a website works. At the same time, WooCommerce has an unlimited capability for our web design team to design and develop the website while enabling us to scale it as large as required.

In the future, Pro4mance plans to continue to grow its website by adding video and interactive media. They will also be adding more products and content for their growing customer base of performance athletes. The company hopes to soon broaden its reach beyond Australia and New Zealand to the rest of the world.

When asked if he had any advice to share with those considering selling online, Andrew had this to say:

If you are not selling online, your competitor is, and you are losing sales. WooCommerce makes it easy to start a simple, low cost, online eCommerce website, which you can then have unlimited capabilities to scale as your business grows. If you are not selling online currently, start today.

Mike also chimed in with his thoughts on using WooCommerce to start an online business:

The best thing about WooCommerce is that someone who’s not a developer can get started with it and learn the eCommerce ropes. At the same time, they can put it in the hands of a developer who can transform it into a high-scale online store making millions and selling thousands of products.

With other platforms, there are clear limitations before you have to re-platform. With WooCommerce, you can take it as far as your team is capable.

We really enjoyed getting a look behind the scenes of Pro4mance’s fast-paced growth, custom Storefront design, and the functionality that powers their soon-to-be global store. Thanks so much to Pro4mance and Online Store Guys for sharing with us!

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Gary Murray