Celtic FC is one of the world’s most famous football clubs, steeped in history and with a huge international fanbase. They were the first team from the UK to win the prestigious European Cup, and this year the club won their seventh consecutive title in the Scottish Premiership.

We were delighted that Celtic FC entrusted Digital Six with the design and development of its ecommerce offering. The Celtic Store is a one-stop shop for fans to purchase the club’s official merchandise including clothing, sportsgear, souvenirs, homeware and the latest Celtic kits. Our main goal was to build an exciting ecommerce platform that encompasses the enthusiasm of the fans and the history of the club.

Celtic’s website was previously owned and operated by a third-party who had full control over all content and order management. The project involved Celtic taking over the management and ownership of the online shop to give them much more control. Brand new in-house teams were acquired to deal with the ecommerce website, as well as the processing of orders in the warehouse.

We migrated the previous Celtic Superstore website to Magento 2 Commerce Cloud Edition. This powerful enterprise-level platform was the best choice as it offers rich, out-of-the-box features and has highly customisable capabilities. Magento’s Cloud hosting solution allows Celtic FC to quickly scale up to cope with increases in traffic during peak times.

One of the most important elements of the project was to provide a streamlined order system. To achieve this, we worked closely with Celtic's retail technology solutions partner, Three Software. We integrated the site with Retail3 which is Three Software's EPOS system that Celtic use in their stores for stock control and basic customer management. As part of the project, Three Software extended it to also be used by the warehouse team to control the stock and handle order fulfilment.

We worked closely with Three Software to build a fully bespoke integration that handles complex customisable products and passes the data through to Celtic's fulfilment team to complete the orders. Once the order is fulfilled, Retail3 notifies the website that orders have been sent. It also holds all the product data, so our developers built an integration to import product and stock data from Retail3 into Magento.

Magento 2 Commerce Edition allowed our developers to create the ultimate shopping experience. We were able to fully customise every element of the website and seamlessly integrate a number of third-party extensions.

Yotpo’s Community Q&A feature is an exciting integration that has helped improve user experience. It allows users to ask questions within the reviews widget on Celtic’s product pages. Yotpo’s system then emails Celtic’s ecommerce team so they can answer, or they can choose to send the question to customers who have previously purchased the product. The Community Q&A feature has many benefits including driving website engagement and increasing sales.

Celtic's ecommerce site needed improved search functionality that would help provide an enhanced user experience. This was particularly crucial for mobile customers where they are less likely to trawl through pages to find the product they’re looking for. We integrated Elastic Search as it provides a far superior search experience compared to what many other online retailers offer.

Shop by Player: One of the improvements we made to the site’s navigation was by introducing the Shop by Player feature. Visitors can now select any of Celtic’s players from the main navigation which takes them to the player’s page that lists all of the products associated with them, whether this is a shirt or a signed mug.

Personalised Products: Fans are able to purchase personalised football shirts on the website. The functionality on the previous site was very basic, as customers could add text but they couldn’t see what the shirt would look like with their personalisation. We implemented more dynamic functionality that allows customers to see what their shirt will look like with their choice of name and number.

In-House Operation: The move to an in-house operation created 10 new jobs at Celtic Park and it also means that the profits made online are reinvested into the club. This is something a lot of supporters are delighted about.

Since Celtic FC's ecommerce website redevelopment launched in 2018 Digital Six have been in charge of overseeing PPC channels. Learn more about finding the winning formula in the competitive world of football PPC in our case study.