Addressing the Web

Ever have a craving for golf-themed fortune cookies or a roll of bathroom tissue decorated with golf-related jokes? How about the urge to buy a pair of sunglasses with lenses that look like golf balls? Maybe you're a more serious duffer merely searching for that perfect club.

No matter what you're looking for, if it's golf-related it's likely to appear sooner or later on the Morton Golf website. Wacky novelties and a truly broad and deep selection are key business drivers, but catering to so many whims and aspirations requires an e-commerce platform that can handle a vast inventory with lengthy product descriptions. A shirt in four sizes and 10 colors equals 40 SKUs; a single golf club in all its permutations can require hundreds of SKUs.

From the beginning, the Morton family knew it needed help with its online store. Even though it had decades of experience selling golf merchandise in pro shops in Sacramento, Calif., the family spent six months preparing to launch its online store (www.mortongolfsales.com) five years ago. It studied established sites, interviewed acquaintances with relevant experience and checked out the software platforms available from vendors.

The more the Mortons learned, the more convinced they became that they should form a relationship with Volusion, an e-commerce solution provider with offices in Simi Valley, Calif., and Austin, Texas. Volusion's templates enable users to write extensive product descriptions that carry lots of keywords and thus attract the spiders that can generate high rankings in search results.

The site also places high in web search rankings by bringing products to market early, says Ken Morton Jr. As soon as manufacturers alert the retailer to a new product, the online store's data-entry team types the description into the system, even if the merchandise is not yet available.

Thanks to a feature in the Volusion software, the information on the new product can lie dormant in the system until a date assigned by Morton's web team. Then, the product automatically appears on the site the day the manufacturer begins shipping it to consumers.

In other cases, goods not yet available appear on the site with a note on when the first shipments are scheduled. Shoppers can "pre-order" immediately, but the system will not bill them until the purchase enters the transportation grid.

The platform also gives the store the ability to use customer numbers or transaction numbers to track shoppers' behavior, which Morton plans to use in designing its marketing efforts. The software also can inform customers when merchandise is out of stock and can reorder from suppliers, says Clay Olivier, Volusion's COO and chief marketing officer.

Tied together
"In our system everything is tied together," he says. "There's a full ticketing system which is tied into the CRM system, which is tied into the orders. It's tied to the marketing system and shows what newsletter brought the customer in. It's also tied to the ROI tracking system so I can see this guy ordered X amount of product and he clicked on my online ad that was running on Google for brown T-shirts."

The Morton family's history in golf retailing dates back more than half a century to when Ken Morton's father was hired to help operate Sacramento's municipal golf courses in 1957. Nowadays, Ken Jr. oversees the pro shops; his wife Jennifer heads the family Internet business; brother Tom gives golf lessons and handles club-fitting; and Tom's wife Erin is the apparel buyer.

The original pro shop at the Haggin Oaks Golf Complex measured 500 sq. ft.; following a March 2007 expansion, the current shop now measures 15,000 sq. ft., and that doesn't include the 1,400-sq.-ft. club-fitting studio.

Web stock in the store
Very few golf "superstores" stand on the grounds of a golf course, Morton says, and the $2 million inventory at the Haggin Oaks shop attracts destination shoppers: only about two in 10 shoppers are wearing golf shoes, he notes.

All of the stock for the e-commerce enterprise resides on the superstore sales floor. In most cases, the products that succeed in the store drive the website (one exception: the Caddy Shack gophers that sell well online get a sizeable display in the superstore).

Twenty percent of Morton's online sales come from abroad, a trend that surprised the family. Before launching the site, the Mortons had expected it to serve as nothing more than a place for Californians to browse their products before coming in to make a purchase.

The website employs five full-time employees; four additional full-timers work on another of the family's businesses. The Mortons also operate on eBay, where they sell used golf equipment and other merchandise acquired through opportune buys. In all aspects of their businesses the Mortons are guided by their slogan: "Enriching lives, one golfer at a time."