When placing your custom order with Scimitar Sports, have you thought of the opportunities for retailing your goods?
While charities may dispatch products directly to fundraisers to aid the raising of donations, there’s also the need to offer a merchandise element for those who wish to support the cause.
For sports teams and events, an online shop offers a valuable merchandising outlet to raise additional income. Whether you’re a professional team with a loyal following, an OCR organisation with 5,000+ participants over multiple events or an annual marathon organiser, an online shop could benefit you.
Let’s look at some of the reasons why an online shop could work for you.
- They offer a valuable source of additional revenue.
Besides the offline retailing of your product at events, an online shop allows you to offer your products to a wider demographic. We’ll talk more about it below, but we can build you an online shop that caters to your exact audience and your precise needs.
Place a link to your new online shop on your main website, across your social channels and within your email campaigns to help raise awareness of your new online offering. Employing loyalty and time-restricted deals can help encourage more sales within a particular category, particularly if the product your selling is seasonal.
We can offer bespoke discount codes and sales tactics for your online shop to help you market your products more effectively.
- Pre-orders allow you to place a custom order with great accuracy.
By offering pre-order products online with a defined ‘order by’ date, you can gauge demand from the outset. When it comes to placing your bespoke order, we know exactly how many products (in what sizes) will need to produced.
You will need to allow for size exchanges of your pre-order products, but this is the only additional outlay. The fact you are taking money before production means that the products will actually pay for themselves.
- We’ll build it for you.
If your business deals with Scimitar, we’ll help build you an online store to handle your products. Built on our Stores4Sports framework, we areEach customer is dealt with on a case-by-case basis, to ensure we adopt the right solution for your online store. If we think an online shop will be beneficial for your business, we’ll build and implement it for free.
Here are a few examples of online shops we are currently operating:
- Rugby & other Sports Clubs
We currently offer online shops for sports teams, where players within the club can purchase their kit with ease. We’re able to offer various delivery options, including collection at training.
We also also able to create branded retail shops for professional clubs, where you will be able to sell all of your merchandise (including playing kit, polo shirts, leisurewear, base layers, scarfs, beanie/baseball caps and much more!).
- Charity Events
As one of our most popular online shop styles, we have built an exclusive ecommerce platform to benefit the pre-ordering of charity products. Whether it’s one product or twenty, we can offer a bespoke, designed solution for your event.
For example, if you are selling a charity cycling jersey, we offer the facility for people to place a pre-order and select from an array of delivery options. This has been one of the most successful ways of running an online operation, as there’s no expenditure to cost in. As part of the charity event, you’ll also be offering people the opportunity to claim a memento for participating in the event.
- OCR Events
With a number of OCR customers taking advantage of our online shop platform, we have seen the successful use of an online shop to sell retail products to OCR fans. From training wear and leisure wear to baseball caps, snoods and base layers, take our array of quality custom sportswear, apply your OCR branding and sell it online!
We’re proud to have become the OCR organiser’s supplier of choice in the UK, offering the best OCR packages to event organisers. Our online shop is a new extension to this, and allows for OCRs to engage with their audience (whether it’s on a pre-order or held-stock basis).
- Running (Marathon, 10K, 5K & Fun Run) Events
Offering an array of merchandise can benefit your running event. From training tops and vests to water bottles, bags and slip-over hoodies, you have the ability to offer as many or as little products as you want to your participants.
If you’re considering the idea of running an online shop, why not run a small focus group or send out a questionnaire beforehand with select participants to gauge opinion on the range, and ask people what they’d want. Also, check out competitions and see what retail ranges they currently offer.
Finally, speak with the Scimitar experts to identify the perfect retail range for your offering. Remember, this will be retailed at the event as well, and our team have extensive experience in both online and event retailing, and we’re ready to pass this knowledge on to you.
Want to find out more? Speak to your account manager to find out how this can work for you, and whether your business qualifies for a free shop.
If you’re not currently a Scimitar custom-er, call us on 01905 425324, email sales@scimitarsports.com or fill in the forms on this page and we’ll get back to you.
