With the vast geography of Canada, and the decline of the local mom-and-pop soccer shops, Soccer Express saw a need to revamp its business model to focus online. However, its disparate technology systems were holding them back from going full speed into omnichannel success.
“We had a tremendous amount of manual and duplication of work,” said Andrew Veer, Chief Operating Officer at Soccer Express. “We used to have two people dedicated for reentering orders from one system to another.”
In order to scale operations for growth, Soccer Express replaced Sage (ERP) and Adobe (ecommerce) systems with NetSuite’s unified cloud commerce solution -- spanning ecommerce and in-store point of sale (POS) across four stores, inventory management, order management and ERP. Since going live with the NetSuite solution, Soccer Express has increased revenue by 25 percent and dramatically evolved the customer experience.
Delivering personalized, digital-first shopping experiences
Growing its ecommerce business also means catering to its target customers of 13-24-year-olds – a generation of buyers who grew up with digital devices and expect to purchase from mobile phones and tablets.
SuiteCommerce Advanced provides a mobile optimized site using responsive web design. This has led to a 24 percent growth in mobile users and 30 percent increase in sales.
The flexibility of SuiteCommerce Advanced allows for unique features to support their business, including the ability to customize merchandise with names and numbers as well as display tier quantity pricing.
The website caters to individual soccer enthusiasts as well as soccer clubs by offering customized, private club stores. Each club store has its unique merchandise, pricing, and real-time inventory availability. Because club purchasing happens at the start of the season, it was important for Soccer Express to have a platform that could scale to meet the ordering and fulfillment spikes.
“We support more than 150 soccer clubs across Canada and wanted our customers to feel like they were shopping on a local online store,” said Veer. “We now have a platform that can scale and meet the demands of our business.”
Improved customer service
Before implementing NetSuite, Veer said customer service reps were constantly getting the question, “What’s going on with my order?” Now they rarely get a phone call.
Soccer Express has all of its customer information captured in a single repository, providing a 360-degree view of all customer activity, including purchases, returns, exchanges, store visits and marketing campaigns. This allows customer service reps to provide better service and information to customers. Online shoppers also receive email updates on every stage of their order from processing to shipping and delivery.
When shoppers are in a Soccer Express retail store, sales associates can access the same information with NetSuite POS which provides shoppers with a seamless experience across all sales channels.
Customers are also getting their orders faster. Orders that used to take six days to ship now go out in 24 hours or less because inventory and order management has been centralized. Soccer Express now has real-time insight into inventory across its two distribution centers and retails stores. They are able to utilize inventory in store to ship ecommerce orders as well as ship from their suppliers.
“NetSuite has given us the ability to scale our business and improve processes,” said Veer. “By removing the burden of manual tasks, we’ve saved time and given our employees the ability to focus on our customers.”