Intersport Rent gives its ski rental platform a makeover

SQLI overhauls the leading online ski rental company’s website

Intersport Rent is France’s leading ski rental company. A share of is rentals have historically gone through the online booking platform, based on the click-and-collect principle. The website is used to coordinate Intersport’s store network and provide them with new tools to boost business. The sports equipment manufacturer selected SQLI to overhaul the platform. 
 

Improving the business bridge between the digital platform and brick-and-mortar stores network 

Over a decade, the website had become a key channel for in-store traffic and generated both services and additional purchases. But it had reached its limits in terms of performance and was no longer able to support neither growth in online traffic, nor the digital acceleration goal set out in Intersport’s strategy.  

With its new platform, the equipment manufacturer now wants to improve the visibility of its stores, boost online rental business, and particularly promote cross-selling based on its historical web-to-store approach.    

We chose SQLI as our partner to overhaul our platform, keep up with the leading digital trends, and offer our customers a positive experience. The new website should allow us to both achieve our growth goals and meet the expectations of our stores network” explains Matthieu Pellet, Intersport’s Digital Manager. 
 

A bespoke e-commerce solution to meet rental needs 

As Intersport Rent’s business is seasonal and rental demand is driven by promotional marketing campaigns, website use levels fluctuate significantly. Because this business model is based on e-commerce standards, SQLI used two separate solutions to provide a bespoke solution to Intersport’s issues:  
  • Drupal, for the content management side: the teams developed an interface enabling the 260 stores to easily create and manage their pages (services, opening hours, location map), and meet SEO expectations, boosting store visibility in search result rankings.  
  • Sylius, for the transactional side: SQLI selected this headless e-commerce framework to handle rental-specific issues and develop a pricing system tailored to the complexity of Intersport’s pricing policy. Based on a turnkey back-office, the teams customized the solution to include promotional rule mechanics and generate marketing campaigns.  
     

A high-performance, robust and stable platform 

Focus was placed on the website’s performance. SQLI combined 2 solutions: OctoPerf to carry out ramp-up tests, and New Relic to analyze and monitor performance. Currently, the rental platform is capable of handling 2,800 transactions per hour (3 times as many as initially planned) and 500 simultaneous users.  

To design a platform that can handle this high periodic peak demand but also optimize the cost of infrastructure during the low season, the site is hosted on Platform.sh, a solution that provides this flexibility. The website is scalable and also allows for diversification of the rental service catalogue, such as MTB, outside the winter season. 
 

An improved experience for both customers and stores

Matthieu Pellet hailed the improved customer experience on both websites: “We can clearly see a before and after. The new platform meets the mobile-oriented use expected by users, and also provides a better experience for users browsing, selecting and ordering products. The content is better showcased and there is now a clearly-established link between Intersport Rent and Intersport.”  

Intersport’s own experience is also smoother and more intuitive: the simplified back-office allows the stores network to manage their products, services and prices more flexibly and easily.  “We are delighted with how well SQLI got to grips with our ecosystem and expectations. We now possess a tool capable of handling the acceleration we expected. In addition to a considerably improved user experience, we have a stable, robust and sustainable platform. We’re ready to take on the coming season” concluded Matthieu Pellet.  

Website:  https://www.intersport-rent.fr/en