Dick’s Sporting Goods centralizes customer identity

Dick’s Sporting Goods now offers customers a single, secure login across all digital and mobile touchpoints.

Before focusing its strategy on a unified omnichannel experience, Dick’s Sporting Goods developed five web and mobile apps. As more customers leveraged these digital touchpoints, the retailer found that a lack of consistent customer identity across its different apps and sites prevented shoppers from navigating digital touchpoints with the same ease as walking from department to department in a brick-and-mortar store. 

In addition, because each of these systems required a separate log-in, many times the issue of shoppers who contacted the customer service center were not solved while on the initial call.

Deciding it needed to consolidate disparate customer logins to a single login across all touchpoints, Dick’s Sporting Goods selected the Auth0 identity platform due to ease of implementation, ramp speed, and to offload managing infrastructure and uptime. To ensure it could accommodate authentication requests from the millions of customers who use their digital experiences, Dick’s opted to deploy the system on Auth0’s private cloud.

The private cloud solution includes features like geo-replication, increased requests per second (RPS), and improved up-time standards. Dick’s began rollout with Golf Galaxy, a smaller digital property, first, launching in about three months. Then the company moved to its largest digital property, Dicks.com, with over 1.5 million customers, launching the new authentication platform three months later.

Now, Dicks.com customers can log in with the same username and password on any of their digital experiences. Dick’s has also been able to shift development resources it would have normally dedicated to maintaining user identification systems to higher-value business challenges, like rolling out COVID-19-friendly curbside pickup or dealing with holiday order volumes.  

According to the retailer, working with Auth0 to streamline authentication across digital touchpoints has increased the number of customers who sign on to DICK’S platforms by 4.8% year-over-year. In addition, the Auth0 platform has helped Dick’s continue to stay ahead of bad actors on the Internet.

“Auth0 has given us the ability to go beyond just blocking and tackling cyber threats and actually build out threat profiles that help us see what type of attackers are targeting Dicks Sporting Goods,” said Kyle Bruce, manager of IT security, Dick’s Sporting Goods. “This has certainly increased the speed in which we can identify threats.” 

As of Jan. 30, 2021, the company operated 728 Dick’s locations across the U.S.