Leader in Chicago Cubs Merchandise Quadrupled Sales Without Hiring Additional Staff or Extra IT Spending
NetSuite's Ecommerce Levels the Playing Field with Other Major Sports Retailers
CHICAGO, Ill. and SAN MATEO, Calif.,—October 1, 2008—NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), a leading vendor of on-demand, integrated business software suites, today announced that Wrigleyville Sports, a leading retailer of Chicago Cubs baseball merchandise and collectibles, is meeting the demands of high-volume sales with NetSuite's powerful Ecommerce engine. Thanks to NetSuite's integration of Ecommerce capabilities like automated order processing, inventory management and integrated UPS shipping, Wrigleyville Sports has quadrupled its businesses in the past two years and is saving thousands of dollars in labour and IT costs. The company is running its core business operations on NetSuite, including customer relationship management (CRM), inventory management, order processing and ecommerce. And with NetSuite, Wrigleyville Sports is able to compete nationally on the same playing field as other major sports franchise retailers. For more information about how Wrigleyville Sports uses NetSuite, please visit www.netsuite.co.uk/wrigleyville.
Wrigleyville Sports has been serving Cubs fans since opening its first location in 1990 on 959 W. Addison Street in Chicago, across from Wrigley Field. Since then, the company has been riding the highs and lows of baseball on Chicago's North Side.
As the company grew to include a dedicated warehouse, a satellite department store location in Chicago's downtown, and a Pittsburgh branch catering to the local Pirates and Steelers (www.thepittsburghfan.com), the limitations of its business software, including Retail Star for Ecommerce, began to show. On the fulfilment side, all of Wrigleyville's orders had to be billed manually, and there was no integration with its shipping carriers. The company had to keep five people working on billing and shipping processes all day just to keep up with order volume.
After looking at various options in 2007, including Microsoft Great Plains and Sage ACCPAC, Wrigleyville Sports chose NetSuite for enterprise resource planning (ERP) / accounting, CRM and Ecommerce, integrated with OnSite for point-of-sale functionality. That decision came none too soon, as the 2008 regular season success of the Cubs brought fans to the Wrigleyville retail and Web store in unprecedented numbers. As a result, daily order volumes have as much as quadrupled on a year-over-year basis. NetSuite has handled the mounting order volume smoothly.
Wrigleyville Sports found in NetSuite a real-time, multi-site environment to manage its expanding order volume in an all-in-one approach that could be quickly deployed. NetSuite also offered appealing, easily customised templates for Wrigleyville's Web store that had all the needed functionality, helping the company avoid the expense of hiring full-time IT professionals to design and maintain such a system. Wrigleyville is now able to better target its marketing efforts with instant, real-time campaign tracking.
"Instead of just knowing on an intuitive basis how our promotions are doing, I can see exactly what goes out the door because of an e-mail campaign," said Trey Carlstrom, Co-Owner, Wrigleyville Sports. "Thirty seconds after I send the campaign the orders start, and I can see if they bought what we promoted in the campaign, or chose to click through and buy something else."
In need of enterprise-like functionality to run its fast-growing operations, Wrigleyville uses NetSuite business software to help the company make better use of its personnel.
"Now that our order processing, inventory management, and UPS shipping processes are so well-integrated and automated, we have been able to take five people off of manual order processing and put them on the phones, assisting customers," said Carlstrom. "Order processing now is as simple as the click of a button. And we're saving tens of thousands of dollars in saved salaries in the process."
Shipping has also become more cost-effective, as the company's old system did not support shipping from multiple locations. Now Wrigleyville Sports can prepare items for shipment from all of the company's warehouse and store locations, both in Chicago and in Pittsburgh.
The company currently plans to use NetSuite's SuiteTalk Web services integration to sell through eBay, Amazon, and other popular marketplaces without introducing additional IT overhead in the near future. NetSuite hopes to help Wrigleyville Sports expand its business, without requiring the company to hire more staff or to chain managers to their desks.
For more information about Wrigleyville Sports, visit www.wrigleyvillesports.com.
For more information about NetSuite Inc., please visit www.netsuite.co.uk.
NOTE: NetSuite and the NetSuite logo are registered service marks of NetSuite Inc.