Matthew Collins, the 6th of August 2026
Club shops have a rhythm most retailers don't. A new home shirt drops and a season's worth of demand lands in a week. A big fixture sends a rush of supporters to the site at once. Then it goes quiet until the next moment.
Shopify suits sports clubs because it lets the retail team handle those peaks themselves. They can add products, run launches and change the homepage without waiting on a developer. The work that makes it succeed sits underneath. A catalogue someone can manage, fulfilment that doesn't need copying and pasting, and a switchover planned around the fixture list.
What makes sports club retail different?
A club shop isn't a normal fashion store with a crest on it. A few things come up on almost every club project.
- The catalogue has had many owners. Commercial staff change, suppliers change, and each season adds a new naming habit.
- Demand is driven by the calendar. Kit launches, cup runs and end-of-season sales matter more than a steady weekly pattern.
- Some products are made to order. Personalised shirts and printed items often go through a print on demand partner.
- Supporters buy online and at the ground. They expect the same products, the same prices and a sensible way to collect.
- Members and season ticket holders may expect their own offers or early access.
None of this is exotic. It just needs to be designed in from the start rather than patched on after launch.
Why clubs move from Jonas Sports to Shopify
When clubs move their online retail from Jonas Sports to Shopify, it's usually because the shop team wants more control. They want to merchandise, develop and grow online without waiting on the platform.
On Shopify, the retail team can build collections for a new kit, schedule a launch and add products on their own. There's a large app ecosystem for reviews, email and loyalty. When something truly specific is needed, a developer can build it against Shopify's APIs.
Our page on moving from Jonas Sports to Shopify covers the platform detail. The short version is that it's a catalogue project first and a technology switch second.
Fixing the catalogue before it moves
Years of different product owners leave a mark. Inconsistent titles, sizes recorded three different ways, and product types that only made sense to one person.
We don't paste that into Shopify. We rebuild the structure on the way across.
- Agree one naming pattern for products, such as season, range and item.
- Standardise sizes and options so filters work across the whole shop.
- Decide what becomes a variant and what becomes its own product.
- Group products into collections that match how supporters browse, such as home kit, training and gifts.
- Clear out old stock records that no longer need a page.
Deciding what stays live also affects search. Old product pages that still earn traffic need a redirect, not a 404. Our guide to keeping your Google rankings through a migration covers how we map those URLs.
Print on demand without manual work
Personalised and made-to-order items are where club shops lose the most time. If your provider has no native Shopify app, someone ends up retyping orders.
That was the case at Surrey Cricket Club. Their print on demand providers had no Shopify integration. We built a custom export that sends the right orders to the right provider automatically. Nobody on the team has to touch them.
Not sure whether a job like that needs a build? Our note on choosing between a custom app and a public app walks through it.
Planning the switch around the fixture list
The worst time to migrate is the week a new kit launches. The second worst is a big home fixture.
We work backwards from the club's calendar. Staging rehearsals happen during a quiet spell. The domain moves on an agreed day with no launch or major match close by. Then we watch orders, redirects and customer logins through the first trading days.
Supporters who've bought before should be able to log in and see their history on day one. We rehearse that path before cutover, along with checkout and shipping for home and overseas fans.
What Surrey Cricket Club got from the move
Surrey Cricket Club sell at The Oval in London. We don't have a London office, and we didn't need one. We work on calls, and the club dealt with the same person from start to finish.
We migrated products, customers and orders from Jonas Sports, restructured the catalogue, configured shipping rules and built a new theme. The club stayed with us on an ongoing support retainer after launch.
Orders rose by over 300%, and conversion moved from 1.2% to 4.3% in the first months after launch. The result we value most is simpler. The Surrey team are in the store every day, adding products themselves. The full story is in the Surrey Cricket Club case study, and there's more on our work in the capital on the London page.
Whether you're on Jonas Sports or another platform, the approach is the same. Clean catalogue, protected search traffic, automated fulfilment and a switch timed around your season. See how we run Shopify migrations.
If your club shop needs to do more than it does today, book a call and tell us what's on the fixture list.