One of the largest independent golf retailers rebuilds its commerce and back office at once

The Challenge

A catalog that standard platforms can't hold

Carl's Golfland runs a superstore, a custom club-building operation and a large online business. Clubs, balls and wedges are configured to order, pricing follows manufacturer policy rules, and gift cards have to work the same in store and online.

The business decided to replace both its commerce platform and its back office at the same time. That put decades of customer and product records in play: duplicate customers, inconsistent phone numbers, and a catalog with up to four grid dimensions that doesn't fit a standard three-option variant model.

All of it had to happen while the current store kept selling through the golf season, with fraud screening, state shipping restrictions and card-security upgrades continuing in the background.

The Strategy

Buy the right scope, then fix the data before it moves

PeakBeyond's first contribution was commercial: comparing agency proposals, then reviewing the chosen scope of work line by line with the client — expanding discovery, defining the configurators, and planning a custom theme and a shipping bridge rather than accepting an off-the-shelf fit.

The second was data. We argued that migration quality, not platform features, would decide whether the launch felt like an upgrade, so customer clean-up and a new product schema started well before cutover.

We also kept the old store a first-class concern: while the new platform is built, the live store still gets fraud tooling, compliance upgrades, shipping restrictions and a holiday code freeze.

The Solution

Program leadership on the new platform, steady hands on the old one

PeakBeyond sits between the client, the build agency and the vendors, leading the work that spans them.

PeakBeyond worked with Carl's Golfland's internal team and specialized technology partners to:

• Compared platform and agency proposals, then reviewed the scope of work line by line and expanded discovery to cover the configurators, theme and shipping workflow
• Leads the ERP category mapping, search reconnection and gift-card design in weekly working sessions, plus architecture discovery for order routing and inventory sync
• Wrote the customer clean-up — inactivity cutoff, phone standardization and merge scripts — and exported the catalog into a new product schema that fits both the platform and the ERP
• Set up read-only analysis access to the retail data with customer details masked before they leave the database
• Designed and launched the used-club program: a simplified product type with condition attributes, import template, tax mapping, shipping groups and separate filtering
• Replaced the retail-system integration and keeps the live store secure and compliant — fraud screening, state shipping restrictions, card-security upgrades, import scheduling and a holiday code freeze

The Results

A replacement program that hasn't cost the selling season

The used-club program was approved for launch in May 2025, in time for peak golf season, and the custom club improvements shipped in 2023 after the product markup was confirmed live in 2021.

The replacement of the retail-system integration was tested on staging across gift card, fraud, dropship and status scenarios, then proved against production orders imported into a practice company every few minutes before cutover — so the switch was a known quantity rather than a leap.

The platform and ERP program is under way with the data already cleaned, the catalog reshaped and the scope defined by the client rather than the vendor.

Carl's is replacing both halves of its technology at once without a lost season — because the scope and the data were settled before the build began.