WWF Turns To Escalate To Wrestle With Web SalesWWF Turns To Escalate To Wrestle With Web Sales

When The Rock charges onto an arena's canvas mat, his chiseled 275-pound frame brings pro wrestling fans to their feet. His second goal: to move those feet to WWF.com.

The World Wrestling Federation, which operates its own Web site as well as individual sites for its top stars, has no way other than the Internet to sell merchandise to its fans who don't attend live events like Royal Rumble. So the company improved its online order management this month with software from Escalate Inc.

"TV drives everything in our business," says Mark Macchiarulo, VP of product and brand marketing at World Wrestling Federation Entertainment Inc. Traffic at WWFShopZone.com, the company's newly revamped E-commerce site, surges for about an hour every Thursday night as fans log on after each episode of SmackDown! "It's driven by people seeing merchandise on the show," usually T-shirts or hats worn by a character in the ring, he says. "Not having that on the site would mean lost sales."

The wrestling federation uses Escalate Direct to run the online storefront. It's also the first company to use Escalate Order Manager Commerce Edition to check, in real time, inventory and order status and to increase total order capacity. The tools give the company marketing capabilities it didn't have before. Based on the crowd's reaction to a wrestler, a Web-site manager can post new items for sale in just 15 minutes.

The company switched to Escalate on Nov. 1. Since then, the site takes roughly 500 orders a day, about 30% to 40% more than with its proprietary system. Escalate purchased and hosts Windows NT application servers, Sun database servers, and a network operations center to monitor the Web site.

Pricing for Escalate Direct ranges from $500,000 to $1.5 million; it's slightly higher for Order Manager.