Endicia

Olympia Sports

If you can't find your selection at your store, it'll be at your doorstep in 2-3 days.

Olympia Sports Olympia Sports is a fast-growing retail chain that sells sporting goods and athletic footwear and apparel. They operate 155 stores in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Using Endicia's Label Server API, they were able to dramatically improve a targeted area of their customer service.

Background.  It's not unusual for a customer to find the perfect pair of running shoes, baseball glove or hockey jersey at an Olympia Sports location - but that particular store may not always have the right size or color. Like many retailers, Olympia Sports' salespeople have access to an inventory locator system to find the customer's desired product at another store or in their warehouse. Instead of having the other store hold the item, or having it shipped from store-to-store, the customer can just buy the item and have it shipped to their home with the help of Endicia's Label Server. Olympia Sports offers this unique service for free and the customer doesn't pay for shipping.

Here's how it works: "Store A" locates the item the customer wants at "Store B." The customer's address information is entered at "Store A". A salesperson in "Store B" packs the item and prints a USPS shipping label from their Point-Of-Sale software integrated with the Label Server API. It's picked up by a Postal Carrier and arrives at the customer's doorstep in 2-3 days. A seamless operation now, but it wasn't always this way.

Olympia Sports

Shipping the desired product directly to the customer was part of Olympia Sports' above-and-beyond customer service policy before they started using Label Server in October 2006. Up until then they were using a different carrier without any integration in their POS system. Salespeople would painstakingly fill out shipping bills by hand with no way to verify the customers' addresses. The carrier also required Olympia Sports to have multiple separate accounts, making their accounts payable department wade through hundreds of invoices each month. "It was a logistical nightmare," says Paul Fitzpatrick, Director of Operations and Distribution at Olympia Sports.

Shipping with the Postal Service offered some inherent advantages for Olympia Sports. Some of the characteristics that really put USPS ahead of the other carriers were the unbeatable price and the ability to ship to PO Boxes. Another obvious plus was Saturday delivery at no extra charge. Customers wouldn't have to go through the weekend without their sports gear. With that in mind, Paul searched for USPS solutions and discovered Endicia's Label Server.

Olympia Sports

Endicia's Role  The Endicia Label Server Application Programming Interface (API) allows partners to embed USPS postage labels into their applications and websites. With this functionality, end users no longer require additional software or separate accounts for multiple locations to print Postal shipping labels. While Olympia Sports was one of its earlier adopters, Label Server is already being used by a wide variety of businesses in many unique and imaginative ways.

The Label Server integration was done by DataVantage, makers of Store21, the POS system used by Olympia Sports. It took under 3 months to integrate, test, and roll out this new solution to all the retail stores. Now salespeople enter the customer's information directly into Store21, the customer's address is verified automatically, and a shipping label is generated at the store where the product is being shipped from. Label Server is also used at Olympia Sports' distribution center, when an item can't be found at one of the stores.

The distribution center and stores ship 125-150 packages per day combined. Paul estimates that they save about 45% on shipping costs using USPS compared to their previous carrier. Plus, no matter how many locations Olympia Sports decides to ship from, Endicia's Label Server allows them to use just one postage account. All 155 stores are sharing a single postage balance, which means no more headaches for the accounts payable department.

Olympia Sports recently took advantage of a new Label Server feature that automatically notifies the Post Office which stores have packages ready and arranges for free Carrier Pickup at the appropriate locations. The system also tells the Post Office the number and combined weight of packages for each store.

In summary, Paul Fitzpatrick states:

"The support we have received from the local USPS staff and the employees at Endicia has been outstanding, they have all worked diligently to insure the system works as we need it to."

The Future.  Olympia Sports continues to grow as one of the premier sporting goods retailers in the US. It will open 15-20 new stores each year. The Endicia Label Server API has now become another fixture in their expanding enterprise.

To learn more about Olympia Sports, visit www.olympiasports.net.

To learn more about Label Server, please click here.