Online club shops : current situation, challenges & analysis
The Product and Business teams at Grinta have been since day one in constant dialogue about "club shops" with brands and their wholesale partners across France and Europe. In this context, Grinta has intensified its research efforts in recent months, aiming to enrich its understanding of the motivations, challenges, and operational modes of teamwear retailers regarding this particular topic. We are pleased to share the findings of this research here.
Grinta conducted this research project through dozens of interviews guided by a common questionnaire and spontaneous interactions. The objectives were to:
- Take stock of existing solutions, their strengths, and weaknesses.
- Understand and analyze the challenges faced by these retailers.
- Feed the Product team and its choices in the software development (R&D, features).
- Improve Grinta's positioning as a software solution (SaaS).
"Listening, analyzing, and learning from past and ongoing experiments, not to reinvent or disrupt, but simply to co-build with the aim of improving the existing," explains Mickael Bardes, CEO of Grinta.
Scroll down to read more, enjoy the ride ↓
Context
This section simply presents the foundation of the research project: the surveyed sample, the role of respondents, and the main solutions used.
Current situation
It is a factual presentation that classifies and directly exposes the responses, in numbers or through testimonials, shared by the interviewed retailers.
The Challenges Encountered
Drawing from the responses of each participant, a ranking of the challenges encountered in deploying and managing a network of several dozen online shops has been established.
Why Do These Challenges Exist?
The difficulties in implementing and managing online shops lead retailers to offer this service to only a limited number of clubs, or even to abandon the idea of offering such a solution altogether.
Conclusion
Transitioning from a predominantly offline business, designed to serve grouped purchases of a single entity (the club), to an online business geared towards processing personalized product orders for each club member, imposes significant structural changes and fairly heavy technological and operational investments on these professionals. This is a sufficient reason to rely on third-party e-commerce solutions. And if retailers - those specialists in serving clubs - have a certain future, despite a market in transformation but still largely under-tooled, it appears crucial to provide them with technological expertise and solutions adapted to the size of their opportunities and challenges.
Let's make teamwear great again !