Media Release – Friday 30 November 2012
With last week’s Click Frenzy online shopping promotion firmly putting the spotlight on the state of online retail in Australia, local Canberra based business and Click Frenzy participating retailer Sportsmans Warehouse was pleased to be on the receiving end of an influx of online sales, and to learn some valuable lessons as well.
“When we signed up to be part of Click Frenzy, we did so in the hope of creating some national exposure for our newly launched online store. We also did it to be one of the only Canberra businesses represented in what seemed like a pioneering online promotion in Australia,” said Alannah Magee, Marketing Manager of Sportsmans Warehouse.
“From a sales perspective we were honestly hoping to sell maybe 80 pairs of shoes. Instead we ended up getting over 100,000 website visitors in a matter of hours. Our website crashed for about 1.5 hours but once we got back up and running we ended up with unprecedented sales given our size. ”
Like many other Click Frenzy retailers, the Sportsmans Warehouse website buckled under the strain of so many visitors in such a short period of time.
“We increased the technical ability of our website to take a month’s worth of traffic in a day but we literally got flooded with 6 months traffic in two hours. This promotion surpassed our expectations in every regard,” she said.
Whilst the entire Click Frenzy phenomenon attracted widespread criticism from both consumers and the retail sector, Sportsmans Warehouse has seen the experience as a valuable lesson in online service delivery and quality customer service.
“Our website was down for only a couple of hours, but once it was back up we had more than 200 people contact us through our online customer service centre. We made the decision to offer all the customers who couldn’t reach our website the same 30% discount, and did everything we could do to apologise for our technical issues,” said Alannah.
“It was important for us to deliver on what we had promised, even if things didn’t go exactly as we had planned. It’s clear that e-commerce is changing the way we as retailers interact with our customers,” she continued.
Alannah also noted that their online store capacity would be reviewed prior to participating in such a venture in the future.
Sportsmans Warehouse is a passionate sports and fitness retail organisation that has been in operation for 29 years with stores located in regional NSW, Victoria and the ACT. For the online store go to www.sw.com.au.