Click-and-collect: A key to Sportmaster’s omni-success
Sportmaster experienced great digital growth when they implemented click-and-collect. Inspired by online marketplaces, now the sports retailer wants to upgrade the service significantly.
Back in 2012, the Sportmaster chain had a total of around 15 web orders on a typical workday. Times have definitely changed, and now, eight years later, the story is completely different.
Today up to 25 percent of our total sales are digital, and that’s considerably higher than the benchmark of the omni industry, so we’re performing quite decent
Click-and-collect made Sportmaster tick
In 2014 Sportmaster launched a new website that offered the customers click-and-collect, where customers for the first time in the retailer’s history could order online and collect their package – that was shipped from a central warehouse – at their local Sportmaster store.
This new omnichannel initiative got things going for the Sportmaster who opened its first physical shop back in 1979.
“The first year running our new website our e-commerce grew more than 100%, and over the next five years we saw a growth in digital turnover of 700%”, Aleksander Nilsson reveals.
Online secures in-store purchases
Today, according to Aleksander Nilsson, click-and-collect orders constitute a third of Sportmaster’s overall e-commerce orders. But Sportmaster.dk also generates a lot of ‘traditional’ purchases, Aleksander Nilsson says:
80% of our in-store purchases stems from purchase journeys that started online. So, a great deal of our customers seek our stores as a touchpoint. This tells us that visiting the physical store and having a personal experience is still of great value to our customers
Same same, but different
Though Sportmaster has sported services like click-and-collect for approximately six years, and the online service has moved Sportsmasters E-commerce considerably, Aleksander Nilsson thinks there’s room for improvement:
“Concerning click-and-collect we are doing well – but we want to do even better. Our focus is to upgrade our e-commerce platform enabling the customer to access the inventory of the whole chain instead of only what we have at our central warehouse and thereby ‘ship from store’”.
Aleksander Nilsson also looks forward to implementing other initiatives like ‘dropshipping’ and one-hour click-and-collect in the future”.
Marketplace ambitions
Sportmaster has the ambitions to be sort of an equivalent to a Danish marketplace within the sports category, Aleksander Nilsson tells.
We want to emulate a marketplace in the sense that we need to be better at selling products we don’t have on stock ourselves.
He adds:
“Some of our biggest suppliers consider Amazon as a great threat – because it is a marketplace that potentially is going to snatch shares from their brand in the respective markets. But instead of cannibalizing their market share like Amazon, Sportmaster seeks to forge win-win cooperation with the brands”.
Assortment explosion
Fortunately, brands are buying into Sportmaster’s idea. And if they succeed it will result in a massive change regarding the size of the selection Sportmaster is offering the customers, Aleksander Nilsson tells.
“This scenario would effectively elevate Sportmaster from having 10.000 sports products on the shelves to offer potentially twice that amount from external suppliers. Instead of getting run-over by the likes of Amazon, we aim to up our own game”.
