Toby’s Sports is the Philippines’ first—and largest—specialty sports store. With 67 retail stores and a hugely successful online store stocking over 100,000 products, Toby’s Sports has grown to become the biggest sports retailer in the country.
Always on the hunt for a competitive edge, Toby’s Sports recognised the potential of ecommerce early on—years before mainstream adoption in the Philippines. The team invested in building ecommerce infrastructure to test and learn how this new sales channel could strengthen the business. However, the bespoke ecommerce solution they were using required assistance from a third-party developer to make simple updates, hampering their ability to add new products and adjust inventory levels in a timely manner.
Predicting that ecommerce would become more popular in the future, and wanting a more streamlined way to manage online selling, Toby’s Sports migrated to Shopify in 2017 and upgraded to the Shopify Plus plan in 2018. This decision quickly paid off, as they were able to capitalize on the surging demand for online shopping without extensive technical expertise.
Today, Toby’s Sports’ online store and physical stores work in harmony, offering Filipinos the ability to blend their love for mall culture with the convenience of online shopping in an omnichannel experience.
Since moving to Shopify, Toby’s Sports has seen:
- 13.5x increase in sales
- 101% improvement in profitability
- 50% increase in conversions
The challenge: A cumbersome website and inconsistent customer experiences
Toby’s Sports’ first online store was built by a third-party developer and could not be managed in-house due to its intricate coding structure, which required expensive, specialized technical expertise. This meant that updating and maintaining inventory online was an inefficient process, prompting them to look for a more efficient way.
Moving to Shopify gave Toby’s Sports a plug-and-play solution that empowered them to quickly and easily upload products and make changes to the site themselves. When a custom solution was required, the flexibility and API integrations offered by Shopify meant that Toby’s Sports could create the right user experiences or integrate back-end systems to suit their needs.
Moving with more velocity ensured efficient operations and gave Toby’s Sports the ability to scale according to demand. With the right platform in place, Toby’s Sports turned their attention toward customizing the store to offer their desired CX experience and creating an even better customer experience with streamlined checkout.
Shopify’s ease of use in managing and customizing the checkout experience made it easy for them to begin onboarding major local payment gateways to improve the checkout experience of the average Filipino, which was then largely dependent on cash on delivery. This quickly changed due to the arrival of several mobile wallets, bank integrations, direct debit, and buy now pay later integrations that occurred in the subsequent years.
Over time, Toby’s Sports realized that the lack of integration between their in-store POS system and ecommerce platform was limiting their ability to create a seamless omnichannel experience for their customers. Photos were difficult to optimize and host, products were hard to search for and difficult to categorize and organize properly due to subpar navigation, and items had to be manually delisted when out of stock, creating inefficiencies.
What’s more, the lack of a dedicated order management system made it difficult for Toby’s Sports to track customer orders, lacking any integrations with major third-party logistics partners in the country. Given the prevalence of mall culture in the Philippines, providing a convenient and unified experience was critical.
Lastly, Toby’s Sports wanted to pursue sustainable growth in the local market. This compelled them to build their own customer base and refine selling on their own channels first, rather than relying on online marketplaces, where sales are often quick yet transient.
The solution: Efficient omnichannel software
Toby’s Sports switched to Shopify to take advantage of even greater efficiencies and prepare themselves for a potential increase in online shopping popularity.
Our culture of innovation has meant we’ve always been first movers. Switching to Shopify kept us ahead of the curve—the flexibility and ease of use helped us capitalize on the ecommerce boom. With less time spent on the tech, we can focus on demand creation, merchandising, product curation and fulfillment.
Feeling confident they could run efficient ecommerce operations using Shopify, Toby’s Sports turned their attention to growing the business. To bring to life their vision of a seamless omnichannel experience, Toby’s Sports engaged the services of Shopify partner Retail Associates to implement click-and-collect capabilities. For the first time, local customers could create orders online and pick them up in Toby Sports’ flagship branch, unifying the shopping experiences for customers across the brand’s online and physical stores and allowing quick access to products to people in the most mature urban community in the Philippines.
Toby’s Sports also took advantage of Shopify’s integration capabilities, connecting with Microsoft Dynamics to display accurate in-store inventory numbers for customers online, running click-and-collect and member management via an integration with LS Retail, and using over 20 third-party applications to manage everything from bulk export to shipping routes across 7,000 islands.
The results: From retail store to omnichannel powerhouse
Building the capability to sell on their own platform—rather than through online marketplaces—has helped Toby’s Sports own the customer relationship and access detailed customer shopping habits. Because of Shopify, Toby’s Sports can now offer customers seamless omnichannel experiences, coupling the benefits of ecommerce product discovery with the experiential advantages of in-store shopping.
Being able to capture customer data both in-store and online allows Toby’s Sports to make decisions that help them increase customer loyalty. And because Shopify is so easy to use, the brand has also driven down operational costs.
Their online store is now the biggest contributor in terms of revenue, but Toby’s Sports is already planning ahead. They’re focused on improvements to merchandising, increasing their product range and enhancing curation, and elevating the digital customer experience. Toby’s Sports is also keen to use tech to tackle the challenge of shipping across more than 7,000 islands, using their extensive retail network for ship-from-store capabilities and enhanced courier integrations. This will help expedite delivery to customers anywhere in the Philippines and elevate the customer experience.
Implementing Shopify has been pivotal in delivering a superior omnichannel experience to our customers. The platform is incredibly straightforward to use, and thanks to its seamless integrations we can easily manage our online and in-store operations, ensuring consistency and convenience at every touchpoint.
