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Finding their stride: How SportsShoes.com rebooted revenue by 60% in 2024

Learn how a strategic spring from our performance marketing team helped SportsShoes.com boost their year-on-year revenue by 60%.

23 April 2025 6 minute read

Performance marketing Affiliate marketing

Our impact.

+60%

revenue growth YoY

+28%

affiliate commission increase

+16%

aov increase YoY

SportsShoes.com are the UK’s no. 1 online retailer for running, gym and hiking. Their mission is to help their customers lead a happier and healthier life through running and fitness, and to help you make the best product choices to achieve your fitness goals.

With over 30 years of expertise, they work hard to deliver industry leading expert advice and support to help you make the best product choices. From the UK’s only free online gait analysis, to their shoe and jacket finders, live chat expert advice as well as their Running, Trail and Training advice hubs, they’re on hand to help you find your perfect product.

(Re)setting the pace

SportShoes.com has a longstanding relationship with affiliate marketing, but as things started to flatline, they decided something needed to change. Growth had slowed and questions were starting to be asked as to whether performance marketing was a strategy they wanted to stick with.

As their motto suggests ‘there’s no fun standing still’, the team there decided to mix things up and partnered with Visualsoft with the goal to get their affiliate marketing channel back on track and delivering those all-important results.

Starting with the foundations

Before diving straight in, our team took a step back and made sure the basics were done right. From the off, we undertook a full partner audit, figuring out who was driving the most value (and more importantly, who wasn’t). After this, we made a big decision - one which would lead to a more robust and scalable solution for SportsShoes.com future growth - we migrated their entire program over to Partnerize.

Building better partnerships

After we’d made sure the program was right technically, we got to work on the human side of the strategy by ramping up communications with key affiliates, having a regular dialogue which had been clearly lacking before. This helped our team build up that all-important trust factor which inevitably boosts engagement and ensures everyone involved is pulling in the same direction.

To add to this, we zoomed in on niche, high-performing affiliates - particularly in the running industry. With a new spring in our step and a fresh focus on collaboration, alignment and optimisation, we re-engaged partners like RunRepeat to build out SportsShoes.com brand goals.

Tapping into the student market

As students were a major audience for SportsShoes.com, we decided it made sense to cast the net further afield. As they already had StudentBeans on the books, we wanted to bring UNiDAYS into the mix as well. From this approach, our team could fully maximise reach across target demographics and give us a springboard into international markets off the back of it.

The results speak for themselves

With all that said and done, the results were fantastic and SportsShoes.com tapped into tangible, real growth:

Their revenue jumped a massive 60.3% YoY.
Thanks to smarter commission structures, commission only increased by 28%.
Their Average Order Value (AOV) rose by 16%.

These results speak volumes for the affiliate efforts we put in but also speak to the wider success of SportsShoes.com, who in 2024, hit 90m in annual turnover with a 13% increase in outdoor product sales alone.

Ready to build out your affiliate network?

Working with Visualsoft has been a real pleasure and a major driver of growth for SportsShoes.com. They truly understand our business, feel like part of the team, and have delivered a smart affiliate strategy that’s brought clear, measurable results. We really value the partnership and look forward to what’s next."

Dan Cartner - Head of Marketing

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Finding their stride: How SportsShoes.com rebooted revenue by 60%

SportsShoes.com boosted year-on-year revenue by 60% in 2024 through a strategic affiliate marketing partnership with Visualsoft.

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