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Clubhouse Golf

Clubhouse Golf are the largest and most trusted independent multi-channel golf retailer in the UK offering a big choice, with great value.

With over 30 years of experience in golf retail and a full team of PGA Golf Professional’s and expert staff their success is down to providing total commitment and dedication to all their customers giving them 100% satisfaction.

Commercial goals achieved

  • Core technical services, including hosting and support
  • Front end responsive web design
  • Signature feature development
  • Back office integration for fulfilment

The relationship

Sellerdeck first started delivering ecommerce solutions to Clubhouse Golf in 2007 when the company had a small online presence and a turnover of £1 Million. Since then, Clubhouse Golf has grown from £1 Million turnover to over £50 Million turnover and Sellerdeck has been their preferred ecommerce provider during this incredible growth. With a relationship standing longer than a decade, Sellerdeck and Clubhouse Golf are close partners.

Specific features

Extensive use of filtering. They have around 1300 filter pages, with no duplicate products.

Clubhouse Golf have a large product range and have always provided different ways of navigating to them. For example, they have Brand pages which allow viewing of all products for a brand, separate to their main navigation route by product type. There is a Mizuno Drivers brand section at here with breadcrumb trail of “Shop By Brand / Mizuno / Mizuno Golf Drivers”. However, if you navigate via Golf Clubs, Golf Drivers, Mizuno, you get to this page. The latter link only shows right-handed clubs, and the brand page includes both dexterity.

Product filtering is an additional navigation tool used on most sections. The brand pages simply find products across the whole site that have the appropriate criteria.

There are over a thousand filter pages.

After downloading cached filter data, filter pages operate entirely in the browser, delivering super fast response times as filter options are selected. This gives top-class performance when combined with static filter pages and produces one of the fastest product filtering navigation available.

Conversion of tabs to accordions on product pages. The accordion control is carefully tweaked to ensure that it works well on mobile. When clicked, the accordion moves to the top of the display.

Clubhouse Golf product pages have a tabbed view of the information for the product. When viewed on mobile, the presentation changes from tabs to a series of accordions. However, the accordion behaviour is customised so that it gives the best possible user experience.

If when the second accordion was opened, the first accordion was closed, the opened accordion would fly off the top of the page. For Clubhouse Golf the selected accordion flies up to the top of the visible area. A small change and probably not noticed by most users because it just feels so natural.

Grab your smart phone and test the great UX for yourself.

Display of components carefully adjusted to show free gifts, and optional accessories.

Clubhouse Golf use up-sell on many products. For the golf trolley mentioned, they are offering a free product and many additional products that may be sold alongside the main product. These all use Components linked to actual products. A combination of custom variables and layout changes are used to put the additional products in an accordion while highlighting the free product.

When added to the cart, the additional products are added as separate products while the free products appear linked to the main product. This allows the additional products to be removed independently of the main product. This required some tweaks to the Perl scripts but gives great functionality.

Use of dynamic image compression, which operates when Publishing. This means images can be scaled appropriately from original sizes, reducing download bandwidth required. Becoming available as an Extension soon; can be implemented manually by Delivery team.

Lazy loading of images, carefully balanced to prevent too much display without images. For example, all mega menu images are only loaded if in Desktop, saving a lot of bandwidth on mobile.

Clubhouse Golf have many images on their site which can negatively affect page load speed; they are also very careful with their images, as they are typically high-contrast and have diagonal lines. Showing images at lower resolutions would easily show “jaggies”, particularly on retina display smart phones. Different sizes are required for Filtering, cart thumbnails, product carousels and zoom images.

Hand-optimising all those images would be a poor use of time. Sellerdeck has produced a PHP extension to do this automatically when publishing the site. This uses the Image Magick library with a carefully crafted set of instructions to save images at different quality levels and sizes. This can take some time, but images are cached and only regenerated when the original changes. The optimisation saves many KB and allows Clubhouse Golf to show images at half their actual size, so they appear very cleanly on retina displays.

Clubhouse Golf also have lazy loading of images, targeted and adjusted as needed. This can automatically load images when they become visible, reducing download requirements if a page is never scrolled. There is further customisation: for example, the images in the desktop mega menu are not downloaded on mobile.

Foreign currency with country automatically selected, and conversion to a range of European currencies. Payment in any currency.

Selling overseas effectively is an important part of Clubhouse Golf’s business. Various strategies throughout PHP, JavaScript and Perl are used to convert GBP prices to EUR, DKK and SEK. This uses conversion rules which round up or down as appropriate, so prices in the other currencies are at a logical price point (e.g. always showing 99 cents). The delivery country (and currency) are chosen automatically using IP address geolocation, and a welcome message is given in the language of the country. Euro prices are displayed differently in Ireland to the rest of Europe.

Currencies can be changed “on the fly” using an option in the header of the page. This uses JavaScript conversion of prices when in a shop page, and Perl conversion when in the cart. Checkout and payment is done in the foreign currency.