Website Scores with Custom Gear

Sport Chalet has carved a wide and deep market throughout much of the western United States by making its stores destinations of choice for shoppers seeking the most popular sporting goods and outstanding customer service.

“We differentiate ourselves from the competition by doing a number of things, like focusing on putting experts on the selling floor,” says chairman and CEO Craig Levra, whose company operates 51 stores in Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah. “We really live it, and we spend time and money on training our people. We believe in our specialty store concept.”

Beyond its stores’ broad assortment of merchandise, Sport Chalet also features more than 50 services. “We offer classes, and we train in scuba and rock climbing, among other things,” says director of business development and e-commerce Peter Taylor. “There is a whole range of value-added services.”

While stores offer merchandise that appeals to traditional enthusiasts of golf, skiing, running and skateboarding, the company also reaches out to consumers whose preferences extend to mountaineering, canyoneering and kayaking. “You have to be different in this world, and we always have been,” Levra says. “We are always first to market with new equipment and merchandise, and we have been doing that for many years.”

Sport Chalet recently chose MarketLive to create stronger links between its store and e-commerce operations. The retailer launched its redesigned website in March with the goal of generating additional store traffic while maintaining consistency in its customer service, creating a seamless link between purchases made online and in stores.

The company offers the same assortment in both channels, but its commitment to customer service means that some online purchases will not be shipped because they require proper fitment and personal attention.

“With custom designs, as in custom-built bikes and snow skis with custom bindings, we want to make sure everything is correct,” Levra says, “so customers can preview their choices online, but then they come into the store for fittings.”

In addition, Sport Chalet’s vendors “are excited about being able to properly position and market their products,” he says. “Our e-commerce site is a positive force; it’s a big step forward for the company.”

Enhancements to Sport Chalet’s e-commerce operations have not required any expansion of support staff.

“We add hundreds of items to the site every week and we are enriching our marketing operations, but those functions are incorporated in our overall operations with no dependencies on third parties,” Taylor says. “We have not hired any additional IT team members. We didn’t want to build a [larger] technical team; we wanted to bring good marketing and merchandising to the web.”

Gorilla in the room
MarketLive has been specializing in e-commerce solutions since 1995, and now has some 160 clients. The company touts three areas of expertise: a hosted commerce platform, applied commerce strategy solutions and a network of retailers, technology providers and experts.

“We are the gorilla in the room, in terms of how we serve our customers’ needs for e-commerce solutions and how we differentiate ourselves,” says Mark Pierce, CEO for the Petaluma, Calif.-based company. “We are laser-focused on our core constituency — specialty retailers and branded manufacturers that provide a unique value proposition and a unique experience for their customers.”

To maintain and enhance that focus, MarketLive attracts technology partners like Shopatron, Omniture, Endeca and Bazaarvoice to bring specialized expertise to MarketLive clients in areas like e-commerce design, search engine optimization strategies, analytics and e-mail marketing.

Most retailers today are “competing for share of mind and share of wallet — online, in the mailbox and at the mall,” Pierce says, and “one of the ways they can support stores is through systems that allow for merchandise pick-up of e-commerce orders.”

Customer expectations
Last-minute gift shopping offers similar opportunities for e-commerce to drive more traffic to stores. Research performed at a website can help a shopper decide what to purchase, then the gift can be wrapped and ready for pick-up at a nearby store. Alternately, the same harried shopper may feel a deep sense of gratitude if the retailer is able to deliver a wrapped gift.

Part of a growing consumer trend “is the expectation by customers that they will be addressed individually,” Pierce says. If a customer visits sportchalet.com in search of a baseball glove, for instance, he doesn’t want “to just search a mitts category — it is the mitts, the cleats, the ball, the backyard T-ball.

“It’s not just about the customer expectation,” he says, “it is the way the information is clustered, the ways the site offers an authentic customer experience. To compete with the big-box retailers and the mom-and-pop stores, the site has to offer that unique experience.”

For Sport Chalet, e-commerce is primarily “about where you position your brand and our ability to project ourselves in our customer’s mind,” Levra says. “We are thrilled that [the MarketLive] system can help us accomplish that [because we are] committed to providing an outstanding online experience that is the same as the outstanding experience we offer in our stores.”