Early Adopter of Mobile

With revenues of $1.2 billion, Finish Line is one of the top 2 retailers of athletic shoes and apparel. They operate more than 660 stores in 47 states and online at www.finishline.com.

In early 2010, Finish Line was among the first major retailers to give their customers a mobile-optimized experience, delivering a site designed to support all the top smartphones.

“Mobile usage tripled once we launched, and now stands at 14% of our website traffic.”-Roger Underwood, Senior VP of E-commerce, 2011

Omni Channel Strategy

From the start, Finish Line’s Senior VP of E-commerce recognized that mobile could be a benefit to all Finish Line’s channels – which could even be more important than being its own new selling channel.

  • Stores – By far the biggest channel for Finish Line. The mobile site helps drive store traffic through store locator, product finder and purchase-on-mobile / pick-up in-store (ISPU).
  • Call center – by 2011, Finish Line’s mobile site was delivering 2,000 calls per week to their call center.
  • Online – Finish Line makes it easy to find products on mobile and complete the purchase on their desktop, whenever that’s more convenient for the buyer.

“We are very pleased, and a little surprised, at the value of our mobile site as an on-ramp to our call center,”
-Roger Underwood


Continuous Improvement

Finish Line continues to innovate and enhance their mobile experience, with the site having 5 major enhancements over the last 3 years. A design upgrade in 3Q 2013 resulted in a doubling of conversion rates – on top of all the increases already garnered by the mobile site.

“This is the fourth year we’ve partnered with Unbound. Every year we’ve been able to add features and increase conversions.”
-Jimmy Montague, mobile lead




Solution Architecture

“Early on, Finish Line learned that developing a mobile site raised more questions than it was comfortable addressing,” reported Scott Reasinger, e-commerce director at an Internet Retailer conference. “A major challenge was figuring how best to leverage its existing technology to support a mobile commerce site.”

Finish Line selected the Mobile Presence® software platform from Unbound Commerce. “Unbound Commerce gave us mobile expertise as well as a platform that integrated with our core e-commerce systems: Endeca and ATG.”

Finish Line deploys the Mobile Presence software on its own servers, in order to best fit into its service operations. Unbound provide the maintenance and support of the software and the mobile site, so Finish Line requires no web developer staff for mobile.

“We knew we wanted to create a uniquely mobile site, but we didn’t want to reinvent what we already have. Unbound gave us that capability out-of-the-box”
Roger Underwood