Turtle Beach scales its global business and triples DTC sales by taking control of ecommerce operations

With a rich history in consumer electronics dating back to the mid-1970s, Turtle Beach is one of the world’s leading gaming accessory providers. In 2005, the company pioneered high-quality gaming audio with the very first console gaming headset for Xbox—the X51. Since then, Turtle Beach has become the best-selling gaming console gaming headset brand and one of the industry’s best known brand names by designing innovative, best-in-class products that deliver a competitive advantage that takes gaming to the next level for beginners, casual players, hardcore gamers, and esports pros alike.

Since replatforming to Shopify Plus, Turtle Beach has been able to:

Challenge 

In 2018, as a lean team with no in-house development, and the need to manage more of its backend without such heavy reliance on a third party, Turtle Beach replatformed from Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus. 

Not only did Turtle Beach desire more overall control, but the team needed stronger global commerce functionality. 

“We have nine transactional Shopify storefronts—one for each of the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, and three catalog stores which feature our products in Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand,” said Maria Santoro, Senior Director Global Digital Marketing & E-commerce at Turtle Beach. “That’s a lot of stores to manage, especially with a small team.”

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Solution

By replatforming to Shopify Plus, Turtle Beach was able to use meta fields and Matrixify, a Shopify app, to bulk import new product pages across 11 stores at one time, rather than having to build those pages in each of the different store backends. 

Turtle Beach has also seen significant cost benefits from using Shopify Payments to facilitate global commerce and eliminate expensive foreign transaction fees and constant currency transaction losses. 

By leveraging Shopify Flow, Turtle Beach has even been able to protect market share, and brand equity by mitigating unauthorized resellers from purchasing products in bulk. When orders of certain threshold quantities/dollars are placed, customer service receives an alert, completes a deep dive, and is able to cancel orders if reselling activity is verified.

What’s more—during the Covid-19 pandemic—when many businesses struggled, Turtle Beach found gaming was gaining popularity. With a surge in demand, they were able to remain nimble and closely monitor inventory to triple sales—something Santoro says, “wouldn't have been possible if we didn’t have Shopify Plus.” 

Post-pandemic, the brand still finds itself with double its pre-pandemic sales, speaking to Shopify Plus’ unique ability to expand along with a brand’s evolving needs, even in difficult times.

Results 

Shopify Plus has enabled Turtle Beach to expand its global commerce, grow sales despite difficult economic times, and move faster to keep up with the market’s ever-evolving requirements.