GameStop scores big with ship from store

Product discovery is not a game, and GameStop Corp. is using a newly expanded ship from store program to bring goods as close to its customers as possible.



“We discovered 66% of our total unique SKUs were only represented on our store shelves, not in the warehouse,” Jason Allen, VP of multichannel operations for Grapevine, Texas-based GameStop told Chain Store Age in an interview. “Unless the customer came in a particular store that had that product on the shelf, there was no discovery.”



While all product SKUs did show up on GameStop’s website, they would be listed as out of stock if they were not in a warehouse. And GameStop’s Web In-store program that let employees look up items that were out of stock at the store only provided visibility into inventory at warehouses, not in other stores.



Upon investigation, GameStop discovered that a large number of SKUs only available in-store were returned items that were never sent back to the warehouse.



“It was a massive discovery opportunity,” recalled Allen.



So in March 2015, GameStop did an initial pilot of a ship from store program based on a proprietary system Allen described as a “Band-Aid/duct tape kind of solution” that was very manual to operate.



However, by allowing customers to view all products in the store online, and letting employees in nearby stores view on-shelf inventory as well, GameStop saw a 20% lift in sales of goods that were not in the warehouse.



“Instead of taking items that weren’t selling and moving them around to other stores, we put them in front of customers all the time,” said Allen.



GameStop gradually expanded the range of its ship from store program throughout 2015 and now offers the service at all 4,000-plus stores across the U.S. Once GameStop reached about 50 stores, it switched from its previous in-house-developed system to using eBay Enterprise StoreNet to manage ship from store activities.



“It creates a threshold by store of how you pick and pack orders by SKU,” said Allen. “Employees can find items in other stores if they’re not in the warehouse.”



In addition to boosting sales and customer satisfaction, Allen said GameStop has also been able to reduce the need to offer items on clearance. The retailer can also now use stores as fulfillment points for any customer purchase, meaning a local store can be used to reduce the time it would take to deliver an item from a more distant warehouse.



“Oftentimes, innovation comes from simple pragmatic observation,” stated Allen. “We didn’t build a rocket ship here.”