Since 1973, the family-run Morrant Group has been entrusted with equipping sports teams for clubs, schools, and leagues.
Father, daughter, son, and staff are dedicated to providing the latest products from the leading manufacturers at the best prices for cricket, rugby, football, hockey, and netball teams all over the UK and worldwide and to providing customers with the optimum online and call centre shopping experience.
In addition, Morrant’s subsidiary company, Dukes, has the contract to provide all balls for Test Match and First Class Country Cricket in the UK and supplies contracts with the vast majority of premier cricket leagues across the country.
Until 2005, Morant managed sales for its more than 10,000 SKUs on multiple systems custom-designed many years earlier and ported to the Linux open-source platform. However, these systems were becoming increasingly difficult to support and didn’t offer the marketing tools Morrant needed to achieve corporate goals for sales and service needs.
Supporting Industry Standards
Managing Director Sunil Jajodia notes, “We needed to move on to the next level in direct commerce systems and start using solutions that could support industry standards”. To replace their legacy order management systems, the Morrant team turned to Cyrane, for search engine optimisation (SEO) they chose Netcallidus (now part of the dotDigital group), and for site search and PPC, they used dotSEO, which lets them put SKUs into multiple categories and simplifies finding items once a customer has come to the Morrant website.
The website is “constantly being updated and developed behind the scenes to ensure that the shopping experience with us is easy and enjoyable,” says Jajodia. Our average order is about £50, but sales to leagues can be as high as £20,000. To handle that kind of order, we implemented a B2B version of the order management system to run alongside the B2C version and use the Cyrane integrated website. These systems will also support our expansion into Australia, South Africa, and India.”
Professional Grade
Accurate real-time stock data has proven to be one of the biggest advantages of the new system. It is used with demand history to support purchasing, which can be rather complex in a size and colour product environment.
“We’re also able to do a much better job of marketing,” Jajodia points out, “both on the site and in follow-up emails to shoppers who don’t place an order. In the marketing area, we can segment customers by sport or other interest and can do a better job of targeting our marketing efforts through RFM analysis.”
Morrant recently added PayPal as an optional method of payment and is creating a mobile-optimised version of the site. It is also making a PDF version of Morrant’s 80-page catalogue available online.
Taken from the article originally posted here