“Our biggest driver for growth has been our ability to grow our margins. But we can’t grow the margin and expand into new locations or product areas without being able to see which are performing well and which are performing badly.”
- Chris Williams | CEO & Co-Founding Director
Return on Investment Summary
By adopting Retail Express, Supplement Mart are able to:
Saw year on year reductions in over & understocks
Significantly improved profit margins through better visibility & reporting
Rapidly grew eCommerce sales with omnichannel integrations
Confidently expanded store network through benchmark tracking
The Company
Founded over 10 years ago, Supplement Mart began when brothers — Adam Williams, then a PT, and Chris Williams, then working in marketing — launched a small nutrition supplies store in a local fitness centre.
Fast forward to today and Chris and Adam have expanded their business into a national sports nutrition and supplement chain with 36 stores across Australia.
The Problem
Previously running their stores with Vend, Adam and Chris began to experience increasing limitations and data integrity issues as their operations grew. They were finding it hard to maintain visibility over each store and products performance creating increasing amounts of uncertainty as they invested in expansion.
Chris and Adam were looking for POS software that could integrate well with their eCommerce operations and help grow their online sales, giving them the control and visibility they needed over their reporting, fulfilment processes and sales.
The Solution
In 2016, Supplement Mart discovered Retail Express and worked side-by-side to implement the POS software across their business and integrate it with their eCommerce platform and other business systems to build one centralised, omnichannel solution.
Integrating a new solution can often be time-consuming and daunting for retailers, but the team credited Retail Express for their always-on support from day 1, working with team members who hadn’t previously worked with retail software to build a new solution quickly.
Supplement Mart also took their chance to shift their eCommerce platform from Magento to Shopify and integrate this with Retail Express. The plan was to minimise disruption for staff and shoppers while implementing more powerful systems to give Chris and Adam more control over their margins and aid in strategic financial decisions with less time spent on manual tasks.
The Features
The Results
Since joining Retail Express, Supplement Mart has been able to drive the increase of their store locations and profit margins. With the help of centralised smart reporting, Supplement Mart efficiently shifted their eCommerce and fulfilment integrations and gained the confidence in their data they needed to bring on new investors.
Now, equipped with powerful sales and data reporting, centralised fulfilment and a smart customer database, Supplement Mart have positioned themselves as a leading force in the sports nutrition space.
Powerful sales and reporting data to increase margin & business activity confidence
As companies grow, and stores are added on, maintaining a complete view of business performance can become murky if you don’t have the right systems.
But with Retail Express’ powerful reporting and analytics over the performance of stores and products, Supplement Mart has been able to keep a grasp on their margins and identify over and underperforming areas quickly.
CEO and Co-Founder Director, Chris Williams, emphasised the impact data clarity has had on strategic business decisions, from product and store growth to reporting to potential investors.
“The biggest thing Retail Express has allowed us to do is really giving us the belief in the quality of our inventory, sales and margin data to give us the confidence to grow the business.
Confidence is a big thing. We know we can make decisions and be backed by data.”
Centralised replenishment & fulfilment
Automating stock replenishment and handling interstate orders has been made easy with Retail Express’ centralised fulfilment solutions.
Whether it’s splitting fulfilment across different store locations, ensuring well-performing stock is always on hand and pulling back on others to avoid overstocks — Supplement Mart has been able to handle it all from one system with Retail Express.
Supplement Mart also saw the accuracy of their inventory reporting and stocktakes improve year on year since implementing Retail Express. And with more accuracy and less complications comes more control and an improved bottom line.
”The inventory management side of Retail Express is 10/10. We can easily delegate what stores can handle ordering on their own, what stores to oversee and be able to make mass orders for the whole company. It’s a great feature.”
- Adam Williams | COO & Co-Founding Director
A well-prepared customer database to easily market omnichannel promotions
The majority of Supplement Mart’s promotions come through working alongside third party suppliers — whether that’s discount codes provided to loyal gyms or eCommerce partnership promotions.
Utilising Retail Express’ built-in customer database and promotional capabilities has allowed Supplement Mart to quickly set up promotions online and in-store and track which partners are contributing the most to sales.
And the team have the confidence to always rely on Retail Express to store their customers purchasing history and profiling information for accurate marketing communications.
“There’s great functionality with the loyalty and customer database. We’re able to confidently structure our Retail Express promotions we offer via third-party partners and track which perform the best.”
Making onboarding easy and mitigating the risk of staff shortages
Staff shortages have been on the mind of many retailers across the world, and while Supplement Mart has navigated the past two years without facing shortages, they also know their systems are primed to make onboarding productive and easy for new staff.
CEO & Co-Founding Director, Chris Williams, credits Retail Express for their user-friendly system that makes onboarding staff simple and can be used by anyone no matter the level of technical competency.
“We’re going to have some great growth in the next couple of years, and that comes down to fully integrating with Retail Express and the confidence it gives us. We’re able to project our cash flow, our ordering, our inventory and know that it ties in with our accounts to make forecasting easy.”
- Chris Williams | CEO & Co-Founding Director
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