Building a multi-tenant eCommerce platform for football retail.

Just Sport Pro Clubs

One platform. Thirteen football clubs. More than £13.6 million in online revenue.

Working with Just Sport Group, I helped develop and evolve a multi-store nopCommerce platform powering dedicated online stores for professional football clubs.

The initial challenge was to launch 13 club stores simultaneously, all running on a shared application while retaining the flexibility to deliver a distinct brand experience for each club. The platform needed to support complex teamwear purchasing, bespoke product personalisation and club-specific requirements without duplicating the underlying infrastructure.

I led the technical development of a bespoke, responsive theme and extended the platform with custom checkout functionality, shirt personalisation and additional workflows. This created a flexible foundation that could be tailored to individual clubs while continuing to evolve through ongoing enhancements over the years that followed.

The platform supported significant growth in online trading, with cumulative website revenue exceeding £13.6 million.

• nopCommerce
• Multi-tenant eCommerce
• Platform Engineering
• Product Personalisation
• Bespoke Theme
• Custom Checkout
• Bespoke Customer Journeys
• Bespoke Payment Gateways
• Custom Plugin Development
• EFL Badge Integration
• Technical Consultancy
• Performance Optimisation
• Load & Stress Testing

After three unsuccessful website rebuilds in four years, Just Sport Group needed a solution that could deliver the reliability, functionality and ongoing technical support previous suppliers had failed to provide.

The brief was to consolidate 13 football club online stores into a shared platform without losing the individual identity and requirements of each club. The system needed to support specialist football retail functionality, provide a consistent shopping experience and remain flexible enough to accommodate new requirements over time.

It also needed to cope with the demands of online football retail, including seasonal peaks, new kit launches, personalised products and the operational complexity of fulfilling orders across multiple club stores.

The goal wasn't simply to launch another set of websites. It was to establish a sustainable technical foundation for long-term growth.

A shared multi-tenant eCommerce platform

I designed and developed a shared nopCommerce platform supporting 13 distinct football club storefronts from a single application and codebase.

This approach provided a common technical foundation while allowing each club to maintain its own branding, products and customer-facing experience. Rather than developing and maintaining 13 completely separate systems, functionality and improvements could be managed centrally, reducing duplication and supporting more consistent platform development.

The architecture also provided a foundation for continued investment as the business and its requirements evolved.

Bespoke football retail experiences

Standard eCommerce functionality wasn't sufficient for every aspect of football club retail. I developed bespoke functionality around the needs of the business and its customers, including:

• Bespoke responsive themes tailored to individual club identities and shopping experiences.

• Custom checkout functionality designed around the requirements of the stores and their customers.

• Product personalisation, allowing supporters to add shirt names and numbers and preview their selections.

• Club-specific product embellishments, including league logos and badges.

• Custom plugins and integrations supporting specialist functionality and operational workflows.

• Fulfilment and logistics integrations connecting the eCommerce platform with the wider business.

The result was a platform tailored to football retail rather than a collection of generic storefronts.

Performance engineering and scalability

Major football kit launches were among the most demanding periods for the platform. Spikes in supporter traffic placed significant pressure on the underlying nopCommerce application, and the standard implementation struggled to cope. Before the performance improvements, the client relied on expensive queueing software to manage demand and help prevent the website from becoming overwhelmed.

I tackled the underlying performance issues through targeted caching, database optimisation and infrastructure improvements. In particular, tenant-aware view-component caching reduced unnecessary database queries and CPU load while ensuring the correct content was served to each club storefront.

The objective was not simply to make pages load faster, but to remove the operational uncertainty surrounding major kit launches. By addressing the bottlenecks within the platform, I enabled launches to proceed without the previous issues or the client having to worry about whether the website would cope with demand.

I validated the platform using Loader.io, testing key pages including the homepage and category/subcategory pages under sustained traffic. At 100 new clients per second, average response times were approximately 155ms for the homepage and 181ms for category/subcategory pages, with 6,000 successful responses and no reported HTTP errors or timeouts in those tests.

This combination of targeted engineering and load testing transformed performance from a recurring operational concern into a platform capability the client could rely on during critical trading events.

Long-term technical consultancy

My contribution extended well beyond the initial platform delivery. Working alongside the business over the long term, I advised on technical architecture, platform strategy, requirements and priorities for future development.

This meant challenging assumptions, helping stakeholders make informed technical decisions and delivering improvements incrementally as new needs emerged.

Rather than repeating the cycle of replacing underperforming websites, Just Sport Group had an ongoing technical partner focused on improving and extending the platform over time.

Measurable commercial growth

The platform supported substantial growth in online trading between the 2015–16 and 2020–21 financial years.

Just Sport Pro Clubs evolved from a history of unsuccessful rebuilds into a long-term eCommerce platform supporting 13 football club storefronts and more than £13.6 million in cumulative website revenue.

The combination of multi-tenant architecture, bespoke football retail functionality, performance optimisation and ongoing technical consultancy provided a shared foundation that could grow with the business.

The project illustrates the value of treating eCommerce as a long-term business platform rather than a one-off website delivery: building the right technical foundations, continuously improving them and ensuring the technology can keep pace with changing commercial requirements.