A very large outdoor catalog gets a faster storefront without changing platforms

The Challenge

A slow site on a catalog too big to start over with

Frank's sells fishing, hunting and outdoor gear from a Michigan store, its website and the marketplaces, with everything tied back to one retail system.

The storefront had become slow and dated, and the platform itself was overdue for an upgrade. Replacing the platform outright would have meant rebuilding a very large catalog, its integrations and its search rankings from scratch.

Meanwhile the day-to-day was leaking: marketplace orders stuck before reaching the retail system, renumbered items breaking imports, thousands of items wrongly flagged discontinued online, and back-ordered kits that didn't hold stock.

The Strategy

Decide with evidence, then rebuild the front, not the foundation

Frank's weighed moving to a hosted platform with lower maintenance against staying put and rebuilding the storefront for speed. PeakBeyond ran that comparison properly — demos, a trial store, development estimates for both routes, and a review of what each would cost in extensions and shipping logic.

The evidence favored keeping the platform and replacing the front end, which protected the catalog, the integrations and the search rankings while still delivering the speed the business wanted.

We paired that with an operational clean-up, on the principle that a faster storefront is worth little if orders still stall on their way to the retail system.

The Solution

A new storefront, new hosting and cleaner operations

PeakBeyond led the program with the development, hosting, search and integration partners.

PeakBeyond worked with Frank's Great Outdoors's internal team and specialized technology partners to:

• Ran the platform comparison, then led weekly design reviews for product, category and mobile pages before the build was approved
• Planned and led the platform upgrade, new storefront and hosting move — theme build, menu redesign, integration compatibility, the launch runbook and the cutover itself
• Delivered a root-cause analysis of checkout order failures to the checkout provider, then hardened the new site with firewall rules, security patches and category and URL clean-up
• Replaced site search and merchandising, and traced empty brand pages to how the search module read the brand category tree
• Opened new sales channels — a social commerce channel, corrected marketplace pricing and category mapping, specialty marketplace orders routed into the retail system, and dropshipping with category blocks for restricted products
• Fixed the order pipeline: import failures and retries, a back-order setting that commits stock, bulk correction of discontinued flags, marketplace pricing rules and inventory sync to the shipping system

The Results

Launched on schedule, with the catalog and rankings intact

The new storefront launched on October 15, 2025, on the existing platform, so the catalog, integrations and search rankings carried over rather than being rebuilt.

More than 8,000 items that had been wrongly flagged as discontinued were corrected in bulk, brand pages were fully populated again after the search fix, and marketplace orders now route into the retail system instead of stalling.

Since launch the focus has moved to growth: new marketplace and social channels, dropshipping, and a technical search and accessibility program including accessible sale pricing for screen readers.

Frank's got the speed of a rebuild without paying the price of starting over.