Wrigleyville Sports Hits Inventory Visibility Home Run
By Erin Harris, Editor-In-Chief, Cell & Gene
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March 2016 Innovative Retail Technologies
By shifting its core business operations to a cloud-based single unified platform, this specialty retailer achieved inventory visibility, expanded its fulfillment offerings, and improved the customer experience.
Eric Castellucci, marketing manager at Wrigleyville Sports, knows a thing or two about sports fans. Whether they’re die-hard fans in search of the newest apparel, or they’ve traveled to the stadium to watch their favorite team clinch the title, sports fans want their merchandise now. And they expect brick-and-mortar retailers to have it in stock. To keep pace with consumer demand and to avoid out-of-stocks, Wrigleyville Sports needed to step up its inventory game.
Wrigleyville Sports operates three brick-and- mortar stores (i.e., Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh), and a warehouse in Bensenville, IL. Prior to deploying solutions from NetSuite that also handle e-commerce, CRM, and order management functions, Wrigleyville lacked such cross-channel inventory visibility, which kept the retailer’s inventory requirements high. “Without the ability to supplement stock kept in our warehouse with in-store merchandise, we needed to keep double inventory to be able to make available as much merchandise as we wanted to online and also to keep the store fully stocked,” says Castellucci. Since Wrigleyville deployed NetSuite in early 2008, “overall sales have risen dramatically, and online sales have tripled,” he says.
Other benefits have included streamlining order management and billing processes, which had previously been performed manually. “Now billing requires literally the click of a button to automatically bill all the orders in the queue,” says Castellucci, adding that because these orders have already been authorized during the label printing process, it’s now rare to run into a card issue at the billing point. “We would already have been alerted if the card had been declined, and the order would have been put on hold and not printed out,” he explains.
On a day-to-day basis, NetSuite’s cloud-based solution has expanded Wrigleyville’s CRM capabilities. “We can now look up any customer in a matter of seconds using their name, email address, or phone number, to see any order they’ve ever placed, as well as what actions they’ve taken on the website,” says Castellucci.
Seamlessly Catering To BOPIS
Improving inventory visibility has been an important factor in the company’s growth. So much so that Wrigleyville Sports now offers the buy online/pick up in store (BOPIS) option to its customers, and it has drastically improved the way the retailer does business. “Our customers utilize our in-store pickup offering every day,” says Castellucci. “But the drastic uptick occurs during the holiday season; we experienced a 500 percent increase in BOPIS orders in 2015. We also saw a dramatic increase in BOPIS orders in ‘hot markets,’ or geographic locations that are affected by playoff s, winning streaks, etc .” Indeed, customers can select the instore pickup option during the online order process. Via the NetSuite solution, the nearest Wrigleyville location to the buyer’s shipping address receives an alert that an in-store pickup order has been received for processing. The Pittsburgh and Philadelphia locations ship merchandise directly from their stores, as all merchandise is housed there, whereas the Chicago location ships from the warehouse. Once the alert pops up in the queue, the shipping order, which is printed on-site, will state if it is meant for in-store pickup. “Our associates pick the merchandise and click a button in the system that sends the customer an order confirmation email, letting her know the item is ready for pickup,” explains Castellucci. Most orders are fulfilled within 20 to 30 minutes. Other orders can take a little longer if merchandise needs to be transferred from another location to fulfill the order. Castellucci explains that offering the in-store pickup option to Wrigleyville Sports’ customers has completely enhanced the customer experience and has been a boon for the brand.
NetSuite has enabled Wrigleyville Sports to optimize its business processes and improve the customer experience. The retailer has already implemented mPOS in all three locations, and going forward, Wrigleyville will explore a customer rewards program that would integrate members’ store and e-commerce purchases.