How a Two-Showroom Retailer Doubled Online Revenue by Selling the In-Store Experience

Hear from Recreations Outlet

Who is Recreations Outlet?

Recreations Outlet sells residential and commercial playsets, trampolines, basketball hoops, golf carts and playground equipment. Their buyers split two ways: parents outfitting a backyard, and school districts, churches and daycares buying commercial playground equipment by purchase order.

The company runs a Shopify store at recreationsoutlet.com alongside two Ohio showrooms — Milford, serving Cincinnati, and Powell, serving Columbus. Both locations operate indoor play zones that host birthday parties and sell Play Pass memberships. Rudy DeLois is General Manager of the Milford location; Ashlei Maher leads marketing and operations and is our day-to-day partner on the account.

What was the challenge?

In September 2024, two weeks into working together, Ashlei answered a list of our questions and then said the thing that actually mattered: “I can answer these questions with what we have done in the past… but ultimately we wouldn't be with you if this was working perfectly. We will need your guidance and advice here.” Three problems sat underneath that.

The ad account was measuring its own brand. Our August 2024 audit found 78.2% of purchase conversions came from branded search — people already looking for Recreations Outlet by name. Conversion tracking assigned a flat $754 to every phone call whether or not it produced a sale, and a flat $2,500 to every purchase; quality scores averaged 2 to 6 out of 10, and no negative keywords were in use.

Marketing was split across vendors they didn't control — ad accounts, product catalogs and domains sat with an outside agency (“As you have pointed out, we don't have control over pieces of our marketing”). And showroom sales were invisible: in-store and phone orders invoiced into a point-of-sale system with no reporting link to the website. Asked whether they could tell which calls came from ads, Ashlei was direct: “we don't. We try to ask ‘how'd you hear.’” The part of the business families loved most — the indoor play zones and birthday parties — only existed offline; you had to call or walk in to book.

How did Lantern Sol approach it?

We fixed the measurement before we touched the strategy. That meant rebuilding conversion tracking from the ground up, taking ownership of the Meta and Google ad accounts back from the incumbent, and building non-branded demand so the ad account stopped taking credit for customers who already knew the name.

Then we put the showroom experience online. Most agencies treat a retailer with showrooms as a product catalog; we treated Recreations Outlet as a family entertainment destination — the play zone is a low-cost way to get families through the door, and those same families go on to buy playsets, trampolines and hoops. Recreations Outlet was initially reluctant to put Play Pass memberships and birthday bookings on the website, but approved a test. The results were meaningful enough that they made it a permanent placement, and those new lines now drive more than $211K in yearly website revenue.

We treated AI search as a channel from the start. We ran citation-gap analysis against the competitors winning ChatGPT answers, published an llms.txt file, built a Shopify Knowledge Base of buyer FAQs, and rewrote the top ten products for retrieval rather than only for ranking.

What were the results?

Online revenue doubled. Over the last 365 days the Shopify store generated $1,083,909, up 103% on the prior year. Orders grew 517% to 3,977 and the store conversion rate rose from 0.25% to 0.45%. Every month of 2026 from February on beat the same month of 2025, and July tripled — $161,773 against $52,700.

The in-store experience became a top online revenue line. Over the last 365 days birthday bookings brought in $120,676 online and Play Passes $90,885 — together $211,561, roughly one in every five dollars the store took. In the six months to July 2026 the Membership Play Pass was the store's third-best-selling product at $43,739, ahead of every playset, and by July online bookings alone put Recreations Outlet $40K ahead of its entire 2026 birthday goal. Those same birthday and Play Pass sign-ups now feed Meta, Google and email audiences, so we can follow up with the families who came for the in-store experience.

Sales became visible teaching opportunities. WhatConverts call tracking scores every inbound call — within a month calls were attributed to specific blog articles, and the client now uses call scoring to coach their sales staff. Weekly waiver exports from Powell and Milford load into Meta and Google retargeting audiences and are tagged by location in email. And after we connected Shopify directly to Google Ads, the direct connection recorded $31,416 in conversion value against GA4's $28,306 — about 11% more revenue the bidding algorithm can now see and optimize toward.

Web design, development & CRO

When we started in 2024, the website focused on the core product lines with little about the extensive in-person offerings. We rebuilt each page around the three ways families use Recreations Outlet — indoor play, birthday parties, and bringing the fun home with backyard products — and over the past year doubled both online revenue and conversion rate.

Alongside it we introduced the online Birthday Booking application and Play Pass membership (now $211K+ in yearly revenue the client wasn't previously targeting), moved every page off Shogun so they could drop a costly page-builder app, and compressed 427 images to cut 435 MB from the site.

What did we build?

Search: 16 location pages across every product line for Cincinnati, Columbus and Ohio; residential and commercial pillar pages; ~42 blog articles; optimized meta for 491 product pages and 14 collections; schema, technical fixes and a backlink program (311 → 663 referring domains).

Paid media: 20 consecutive months of Google and Meta management; branded/unbranded search split; product-level Performance Max; geo campaigns for both cities; a nationwide Backyard Discovery dropship program; ~18 in-house video and creative assets.

Site & CRO: new homepage, mega menu and promotions page; six PDP templates; birthday booking app and Play Pass memberships online; a commercial quote feature; an all-reviews page; breadcrumbs; and a Microsoft Clarity behavioural audit.

Email: Mailchimp migration, four rebuilt flows, product nurture sequences, and 11 full promotion cycles delivered end to end.

Measurement: WhatConverts call tracking, direct Shopify-to-Google-Ads purchase tracking, and in-store waiver audiences.