Building Decathlon Play from Zero to 1.3 million users

As a long-term partner, Rivi has worked with Decathlon for over 3.5 years, enabling the Decathlon Play platform to grow from 0 to 1.3 million users and counting. Our team has built modules and features for both B2B and B2C platforms, including Challenges, Fitness/Sports Tracker, Gamification, E-commerce, Analytics, Booking Flow, Partner Onboarding, and Rebranding.

Decathlon is the largest sporting goods retailer in the world, with 2,000+ stores in 70 countries, $17 billion in revenue in 2023, and 105,000+ employees. As COVID hit the world, the reality check of “health and fitness” became inescapable for everyone. At Decathlon, the journey to go online started with a simple QR code-based touchless checkout, which has now become a thriving web and mobile e-commerce app. On the consumer end, selling goods was not sufficient; Decathlon wanted to invite people to start practicing sports. This led to the creation of “All for Sport by Decathlon,” now referred to as “Decathlon Play.” The mission for this initiative was simple: to “get India moving.”

The product requirement from Decathlon was to build platforms where they:

• Enlist verified coaching classes, playgrounds, and offline events in association with Decathlon stores across India for end users to book based on given details, including time slots, cost, number of attendees, etc.
• Register partners hosting these activities with seamless onboarding, scheduling, and billing processes, along with content management.
• Offer virtual challenges for pan-India users in any location, allowing them to automatically sync their tracked sports, score on leaderboards, and win rewards.

Decathlon’s business requirement on a larger level included user retention post-sports retail purchase by building a sports practice loop to bring users back, eventually enabling them to contribute to the “burn (calories) to earn (rewards)” loyalty program.

Rivi’s partnership with Decathlon involved contributing to the technology strategy, product roadmapping, product requirement documentation, project management, technical audits, UI/UX design, web frontend development, Android development, iOS development, backend development, tech documentation, CMS, and analytics integration.

Highlights of significant features implemented in the web and mobile app solutions, such as:

• Challenges: A user acquisition and retention module designed to drive app downloads, leading to a 4x increase in MAUs by 2024.

• Tracker: A custom tracker for activities like cycling, walking, and running that provides detailed performance insights, and recently enabled 100+ sports via integrations with Strava, Garmin, Fitbit, Coros, Suunto, and Polar.

• DKT Login: A significant achievement integrating the global signup/login mandate, unifying data across Decathlon platforms into a cohesive global ecosystem.

• Booking Flow: A complete revamp of a broken booking and scheduling flow, with fixes for all user flows deployed and in use, achieving 100% resolution with no production issues.

• Partner Onboarding: Converting a manual process of adding details into a custom tool for partners to register, enlist, schedule, manage, and invoice for each activity. This automated process reduced the time and effort in planning and publishing from an average of 18-20 days to just 3-5 days.

• Global Rebranding: Globally recognized as the first team to successfully roll out a new visual identity in record time across all digital platforms for Decathlon Play.

• WCMS Migration: Moved major assets like banners, menu, and footer, as well as created complete dynamic landing pages controlled via CMS, improving launch timelines from an average of 25 days to 2-3 days.

• Analytics and Performance Tools: Integrated tools like Firebase, GA4, Algolia, Clevertap, Amplitude, MS Clarity, Tableau, and Quiksite, enabling the product and business teams to make more data-driven decisions.

We successfully achieved this target of ONE MILLION USERS in December 2023.

Rivi’s team started out with just two developers for this project in 2021. Now, having added so much value, the team has grown to 12, including developers, designers, and product managers. In 2021, Decathlon Play had 30,000 total annual users. By 2024, they were acquiring 30,000 users per week, thanks to the upgraded mobile and web applications built in collaboration with the Rivi team.

• Decathlon Play B2C Web App
• Decathlon Play B2C Android and iOS Apps
• Partner Onboarding Tool Demo
• Partner Central Android App