The UK’s largest Sports Wholesale and Distribution Company have redesigned their website.
The reason why? To make it easier for the customers to access the goods they want to buy.
Reydon Sports supply a vast range of sporting goods and services to the independent sports trade.
Reydon have developed a wide range of highly successful, in-house brands which include; Precision (footballs, goalkeeping gloves and training aids), MANTIS (tennis, squash and badminton), Fox TT (table tennis), Midwest (American sports) Swimtech (swimming accessories), Dukes (cricket), and not forgetting their hugely successfully fitness brand UFE. In addition, they offer brands such as Bliz Eyewear, Puma, Fox 40, Speedo, Shock Doctor, Wilson, Molten, Makura, and SmellWell, amongst many others.
Andy Griffin, Reydon Sports marketing manager, explained the changes to the new website.
He said: “When you logged in to the old website all you saw was a standard trade price, you never saw the price you actually paid for that product. Lots of enquiries were being made so our main goal was to provide everything a customer needs to buy efficiently and easily from Reydon.
“When you log into the new site you see the trade price, exact stock quantities, SRPs and most importantly, the price you pay. We still have a very strong telesales team here at HQ, it just means now we have a stronger and more efficient website platform that tells the customer almost everything they need to know. The stock levels are also shown in real time. It tells you exact stock quantities on every single item.”
And Reydon Sports service to their customers hasn’t changed either. If a UK Mainland order is made on the website before 12pm, it’s dispatched on the same day and will be delivered as quickly as possible.
But what were the reasons for redesigning the website in the first place? Andy explains: “ The main reason for the redesign was the aesthetics – the old one was very old school, very boring and also navigation around the site has been improved.
“The old site provided basic categories, whereas on the new B2B site, we have enhanced navigation by adding in a huge number of subcategories. So, in terms, of finding a product – what the customer is after – it’s very easy to do so. So, for example, if you go to football you will have sub categories such as boots, training equipment etc. Before it was just football and you had to sift through the whole category to find what you were looking for – now it’s all defined properly by subcategory – it’s a lot more helpful.”
The new website will bring changes to how Reydon Sports approached their business.
Andy added: “We are moving away from sales reps. We haven’t cut it out completely, we still have a customer care manager on the road. So we’re trying to move more towards the digital way of doing things. So far it is working really, really, well. The industry as a whole I think is going to be more digitally based and we’re hoping to be the leaders of that.”
And Reydon Sports have already seen a change following the launch of the new website. Andy said: “We are seeing less phone calls and more traffic on the website so we’re very excited by this digital movement. That was the aim and it’s working so far.”
Reydon had two aims for the year and have already delivered on both of them: “This year, especially, the two things we wanted to achieve were a completely new catalogue and the website redesign. Both have been successfully achieved and we hope to keep enhancing these platforms as time goes on. Already we have customers using the new website that were not previously buying with us online. We’ve increased traffic and moved people away from the old platforms and are moving them to the new digital one.
“Future plans for the website include more information on the rare occurrence when items that are out of stock; we want to provide the exact date it is coming back to make the customer’s knowledge of our products just as good as ours. We have over 6,000 product lines and in the past have had out of stock issues. This has rapidly improved over the last year and we will continue to increase our impressive stockholding status. So when people log in to the website we want to give them every bit of information about that product, whatever they need, pricing, when it’s coming back in, how much we have in stock, images, etc.”
And with the new website, the company’s marketing is also changing, Andy said: “The marketing for Reydon is now frequently pointed to the website. Before, it was primarily duplicating products out of the catalogue into an informative eshot. But now I have an area on the website I can point people towards – so it’s making my life a lot easier and our marketing is getting a lot stronger.
“Also, unlike our print catalogue, we are able to update the digital version at any time. If a product goes out of stock or becomes discontinued, we have the ability to simply update the catalogue PDF and keep our customers updated through every digital platform. So digitally, the website and the catalogue are both always up to date, always real time.”
And with the move away from reps on the road to the digital format it means that there is more ime to deal with customers.
Andy said: “We are improving our customer care at HQ. So when anybody rings up, anybody here will be able to answer a customer’s question, be able to help and put through an order. We are avoiding passing the customer around between different people, we are trying to get everybody here at HQ helping as much as we can. And now we have the digital platform that is the B2B website, we have much more time to work on improving our service, something we really pride ourselves in. Our full focus now at HQ is customer care.”
