Sports & Outdoors Case Study
Golfio is your one stop shop for all things golf, including clubs, bags, balls, and other equipment and accessories.
Company Profile: Golfio.com is dedicated to providing the best online purchasing experience for your golfing needs. Everyday, we are motivated and inspired in how our quality premium services will help you stay connected to what’s most important to you. We offer only the finest brand name, highest quality and authentic products to help you enjoy your game.
Solution Partners: Channel Advisor | ShipStation
Market: International
Industry: Sports & Outdoor
“Our order fulfillment time has improved by 87.5% – orders that previously would’ve taken us all day, we can now complete in less than an hour.”
Challenge | No inventory system, constant product re-allocations, oversells
When we met Howard Choi, Business Development Manager of Golfio.com, at ChannelAdvisor’s Catalyst Americas 2013 conference, he was a man in singular need of an inventory solution. He knew his pain points – convoluted Excel spreadsheets, perpetual physical reallocation of stock to keep it all grouped together, and oversells everywhere – and he was ready to reclaim those wasted hours. Ideally, he wanted to implement more efficient processes well before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Golfio was founded in 2005, and Howard didn’t think he could stand another year of poor inventory control limiting sales and customer satisfaction. Meeting the SkuVault team at Catalyst was the (ahem) catalyst that Howard had been waiting for to take control of his inventory.
Solution | Locations, locations, locations!
In implementing SkuVault, what’s turning out to be the most revolutionary change for Golfio is the switch to product locations. As Howard puts it, “Our warehouse is slowly becoming what Zappos describes as “Organized Chaos,” meaning, our products are all over the place despite brand and model… As we’re transitioning more towards relying on warehouse locations, putting inventory away is becoming quicker since we don’t have to move our products around and picking is becoming a lot more convenient since we know that if it’s not in that location then obviously we do not have it. Therefore, during the holiday peak season we saved a lot of time when it came to receiving, shipping things out, and notifying customer immediately if we had any inventory discrepancy. And that’s been great for us.”
Results | Decreased oversells, mis-ships, and order fulfillment time
The real test of SkuVault came when their peak season hit. “Our out of stock percentage during peak season decreased by approximately 25%,” Howard told us, “Our mis-ship percentage decreased by about 13%. Having our true available quantities shared across our marketplaces with SkuVault’s ChannelAdvisor integration assisted in decreasing OOS percentage, mis-ships, undersells, confusion, and canceled orders. Every [feature] we used helped us out – adding, removing, auditing, moving warehouse location, item history, user history, and the imports / exports all played a great role in increasing the efficiency and productivity of our company. [SkuVault] definitely helped us fulfill orders a lot faster than before [we had an inventory system]. Before we had SkuVault, it would take us an entire day to fulfill about 50 orders. Now, it takes us less than an hour.”
