Equipping sports teams for clubs, schools and leagues has been
the mission of family-run Morrant Group since 1973. 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 1st Class County cricket
in the UK as well as supply contracts with the vast majority of
premier cricket leagues across the country.
Until 2005, Morrant managed sales for its more than 10,000 SKUs
on multiple systems that had been custom-designed many years
earlier and ported to the Linux open-source platform. But these
systems were becoming increasingly difficult to support, and
didn’t offer the kind of marketing tools Morrant needed to meet
corporate goals for sales and service levels.
Supporting industry standards
Notes managing director Sunil Jajodia, “We needed to move
on to the next level in direct commerce systems, and start using
solutions that would support industry standards”. To
replace their legacy order management systems the Morrants team
turned to Cyrane, for search-engine optimisation (SEO) they chose
Netcallidus (now part of the Dot Digital Group), and for site
search and pay per click they use 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
£20,000. To handle that kind of order we implemented a
b-to-b version of the order management system to run alongside
the b-to-c version and use the Cyrane integrated website. These
systems will also support our expansion into Australia, South
Africa, and India.”
Professional grade
Having accurate real-time stock data has proven to be one of the
biggest advantages of the new system, and is used with demand
history to support purchasing, which can be rather complex in a
size-and-colour product environment.
“But 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 do a better job of targeting our marketing efforts
through RFM analysis.
Morrant recently added PayPal as an optional method of payment
and has the creation of a mobile-optimised version of its site on
the to-do list, along with making a PDF version of Morrant’s
80-page catalogue available online.
Ernie Schell of Marketing Systems
Analysis will be speaking on the topic of technology in the
multichannel world at ECMOD.
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