The Sport Depot: Improving visibility and reducing manual intervention

The Sport Depot specialise in bringing their consumers the best deals on major branded sports equipment, specialising in golf. Established in the sporting goods market for over ten years, they buy in bulk direct from their manufacturers negotiating the lowest prices available and then passing those savings on to their growing customer base. The Sport Depot is available through their own website, eBay, and Amazon.

The Challenge

The Sport Depot is using ChannelAdvisor, an eCommerce platform provider as their order management system. MetaPack is fully integrated with the ChannelAdvisor’s Merchant Advisor Premium (MAP) software, and there are many ChannelAdvisor customers already using MetaPack. Formerly, The Sport Depot would take the sales report produced by ChannelAdvisor and manually populate the consignment data into the relevant carrier system. This method was not only time consuming and costly, it also had a huge impact on resources particularly during peak times. In using this method there was a distinct lack of tracking visibility. The Sport Depot could only react slowly if a customer queried the delivery.

The Solution

Once implemented, The Sport Depot noticed immediate benefits throughout their entire despatch process. The Sport Depot are making use of our flexible grouping
functionality which ensures carrier allocation takes place according to the defined services offered to the consumer at the front end. Having removed the manual intervention and with the speed at which the information is now imported, The Sport Depot are now able to use their time and resources more productively and in turn it allows them to extend their cut off times. The Sport Depot is using MetaPack’s email functionality to notify the consumer when the goods have been despatched and it advises them of a tracking number and a link to the relevant carrier’s tracking site. In offering this proactive response, The Sport Depot has noticed a reduction
in there inbound customer service calls. To complete the ideal shopping experience, they are also looking into MetaPack’s Returns function. MetaPack Returns management software selects the appropriate carrier and service, communicates the collections requirement to the carrier, prints labels (wherever they are needed) and communicates status updates to all parties along every step of the process as required.

"The beauty of the MetaPack system is the sheer simplicity of it. The support I received from the team at MetaPack during the implementation was fantastic. I’m thoroughly impressed with the way it has improved our process, saving us time and money. The main benefits for us have been the email functionality and tracking. Introducing these functionalities has enabled us to offer a consistent level of proactive customer care."

Stuart Pedley, Director