New Sun & Sand Sports webstore excels in omnichannel excellence
Salesforce project with Emakina empowers warehouses and stores across the GCC with unique Fluent Commerce fulfilment logic, real-time inventory and total order lifecycle views
Sun & Sand Sports, a Gulf Marketing Group (GMG) company, recently launched its new high-performance online store, sssports.com. The major Middle East retailer now offers a fast and complete online portal to buy sports shoes, clothing, accessories and equipment from almost 100 top international brands. The website also features news, advice, and promotions, and provides a smart connection with more than 200 stores across the Gulf Region. The website benefits from the combined power of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, Akeneo PIM, and the Fluent Commerce Order Management.
“The smart order orchestration of fulfillment locations, inventory, returns & exchanges is the key to this successful project with Emakina,” said Bhavna Buttan, COO of Gulf Marketing Group. “Thanks to our unified warehouse and in-store platform, our customers can easily pay online and have their order shipped or delivered to the store of their choice. They will also benefit from more efficient on-call sales, sales returns and exchanges.”
GMG is one of the Middle East's leading family-owned holding companies. Over the last four decades, the GMG Sports division has expanded from a single retail store in Dubai, UAE, to over 550 sports retail stores internationally, becoming the largest sports retailer in the Middle East region. The GMG Sports portfolio includes homegrown brands such as Sun & Sand Sports and is also a distributor for global brands like Nike, Columbia, Timberland, Vans, and more.
Combining four top technologies
The new Sun & Sand Sports mobile-first ecommerce portal combines the strengths of four top technologies. Salesforce Commerce Cloud supports omnichannel journeys, Salesforce Service Cloud makes the seamless connection between commerce and customer service, while Akeneo’s PIM brings impressive precision to building and enriching a coherent online product catalog. Additionally, Fluent Commerce Order Management moves the needle as a true showcase of tomorrow’s retail logistics.
Setting a new standard with Fluent Commerce Order Management
Fluent Commerce sets a new standard by better informing customers and making them happier, while sharply reducing unfulfilled orders and stock transfer costs.
The SAP ERP inventory and the full order lifecycle are now available in one system for the entire operations team across the GCC. The advanced fulfilment logic drives orders to the right store or warehouse, considering stock level, distance and even walk-in customer traffic. Customers can buy online and return to any store and immediately see their purchases, in-store or online, in their account order history. As a bonus, all stores and warehouses now can help to deliver ordered products faster and at lower cost with the new internal marketplace system. Warehouse staff can tap into the store inventory to fulfill an order when they run out of stock, and avoid bottlenecks during high-traffic sale events like Black Friday.
A strong one-team project approach
“Beyond leveraging the selected top technologies, the true success of this project was the connection between Sun & Sand Sports and our people,” concludes Murat Yoldas Ertugrul, VP MENA at Emakina. “I congratulate our 25 Emakina experts in this project and their fantastic colleagues at Sun & Sand Sports. As one team, they imagined, designed, planned, integrated and above all communicated well for 9 months, to create this winning customer journey for every sports loving ecommerce and in-store visitor.
