CSA Exclusive: Hibbett tackles online fraud and payment issues
The parent company of Hibbett Sports and City Gear is leveraging managed solutions to ensure smooth and safe e-commerce transactions.
Chain Store Age recently sat down with Bill Quinn, senior VP, marketing and digital at Hibbett, to discuss how the athletic-inspired apparel retailer utilizes cloud-based Radial Payment Solutions technology to manage online transactions and prevent e-commerce fraud.
“There were two issues that were significantly mitigated by Radial’s services,” said Quinn. “Radial technology has helped protect us from ongoing fraud and chargebacks. These costs would impact our profit without help from these solutions.
“Radial has also protected us from resale activities,” Quinn continued. “We sell limited release footwear catering to the sneakerhead community. Radial’s brand protection services enable us to avoid resellers and focus on our customers.”
When discussing Hibbett’s initial selection of Radial Payment Solutions, Quinn cited his company’s relative late adoption of e-commerce.
“Hibbett is unique in that seven years ago, we did not have an e-commerce site,” he explained. “In order to launch a best-in-class experience, we needed a partner that could provide secure and managed payment services while partnering with us to continue to grow and innovate.”
It also helped that Radial is a partner with Salesforce, which Hibbett uses as its main e-commerce platform. This helped make implementation of the managed fraud and payment technology faster and more efficient.
“We have seen very healthy sales growth since we partnered with Radial, Quinn concluded. “Also, we are pleased with our digital business profitability. We plan to continue to innovate with payment types to reduce customer purchase friction.”
Hibbett brings cloud to the store
In addition to using cloud-based technology to support e-commerce activities, Hibbett also recently started implementing Oracle retail cloud technology. The deployment includes upgrading an existing install of the mobile Oracle Retail Xstore POS solution; as well as rollouts of Oracle Retail Store Inventory Operations Cloud Service, Oracle Retail Customer Engagement Cloud Service, Oracle Retail Order Broker, and Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Cloud.
As a result, Hibbett intends to provide store associates with a constantly accurate view of available merchandise across channels and the ability to serve customers from anywhere in the store.
In addition, store-level employees have the flexibility to ship merchandise to an adjacent store or a customer's home if the product they seek is out of stock. And the new cloud-based assortment planning will help the retailer place the right assortment of footwear, apparel, and accessories in the right stores to best meet customer demand.
Hibbett Retail, headquartered in Birmingham, Ala., is an athletic-inspired apparel retailer with 1,133 Hibbett and City Gear specialty stores located in 36 states nationwide.