In this story
Who are T&R Sports?
T&R Sports are a family-owned Australia retailer who have been selling sporting and home gym equipment for over 10 years. T&R Sports operate in three locations across Australia, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
How do most entrepreneurs stumble across a business idea? For some of us, it starts with a hobby, or becoming fed up with the daily routine. T&R Sports owners started as a few Sydneysiders who worked a 9 to 5 and enjoyed a game of pool in their free time.
The couple decided to start their own business by selling pool tables and ping pong paddles, then expanded to selling a broader range of sports equipment like tennis rackets, rugby gear, and more. As the business started to take off, they were curious to understand the market’s appetite for home gym equipment and began some market research. To no surprise, the market was huge. T&D sports now ships over 1,000 sports and gym equipment products to customers across Australia.
What was the challenge at hand?
During the pandemic, T&R Sports took off. But as order volumes grew, the ability to ship and deliver a reliable, transparent and affordable delivery experience became a challenge.
Dispatching thousands of orders across the country while trying to keep shipping costs low and customer satisfaction high, meant rethinking fulfilment workflows and shipping operations that support a positive end-to-end delivery experience.
T&R sports hired a full-time staff member to focus solely on booking orders, printing labels and negotiating the lowest rates with Australia’s leading carriers to find the best bang for their buck.
To no surprise, navigating last-mile logistics was no easy feat. The countless hours spent chasing carriers to re-book pick-ups or locate order tracking details became unsustainable and hindered the growth trajectory of the business.
T&R recognised the need for an automated, efficient shipping strategy so the company could continue to scale while keeping up with the rising volume of online orders.
"Our legacy software and manual shipping operations model were unsuitable for eCommerce and online retail. We’re so glad that Shippit maintains and manages the relationships with couriers, so we don’t have to. It makes it easy to guarantee customer retention because our delivery experience is reliable. Plus, we can keep our shipping costs low for our business and the consumer."
Vic Jiang, Executive Officer
What were the solutions?
Shipping automation and multi-carrier connectivity that finds the lowest cost and best courier provider for any given parcel size.
The T&R logistics team selected Shippit’s shipping and delivery platform to scale their operations because it eliminated manual processes and introduced:
- Efficient workflows
- Competitive courier rates
- Improved order accuracy
- And more.
Here is why T&R Sports love using Shippit:
40% improvement in delivery on time
T&R Sports maintain on-time delivery experiences for their customers with Shippit’s pre-populated default setting for package dimensions, bulk orders, bulk label printing and more, saving the team hours of manual labour every single time. Reducing the time spent on manual data entry has allowed the team to focus on getting more orders out the door, at a faster rate.
If things don’t go to plan, Shippit makes it easy for the team to maintain delivery on time rating by resolving missed pick-ups and order tracking issues. A quick call to the Shippit team has helped T&R Sports save countless hours calling couriers to find a replacement driver to pick up an order. T&R Sports can contact Shippit to immediately schedule a replacement pick-up. They also use Shippit to locate tracking details and relay accurate information to the customer to reduce “where is my order” inquiries.
40% reduction in labour costs
According to T&R Sports, this was a huge burden on their budget. Dedicating a full-time staff to manual order fulfilment processes was not the best use of anyone’s time. Shippit helped save up to $40,000 a year on resources and over 30 hours a week by seamlessly integrating with their existing eCommerce tech stack to build and scale their shipping operations.
30% reduction in time spent fulfilling orders
With multiple locations across Australia, T&R Sports needed a quick view of all their orders and stores without wasting time navigating through multiple pages across the web. Shippit’s technology links three stores and locations for T&R Sports so the team can get a single view of all booked orders in one place. This unified view reduced fulfilment time by 30% allowing the team to increase order processing times. The team can now fulfil, book, and track orders in one place.
What were the results?
Increasing customer lifetime value and driving repeat purchases with a reliable delivery experience.
The rise of eCommerce has driven customer expectations through the roof. T&R sports recognised the importance of reliability and transparency to guarantee a better delivery experience that retains customers. By using Shippit’s live-quoting feature at checkout, customers can get real-time shipping costs at the checkout in under 5 seconds. Their customers love the increased transparency which had shown repeat purchases and growth in volume by 10%.
In less than a month, the team at T&R sports scaled their fulfilment process by instantly automating fulfilment, resulting in improved reliability with shipping costs and delivery timeframes.
"Since we started with Shippit, it has been so easy to scale and support additional volumes quickly. I don’t know how we would have dealt with increased order volumes, network delays and rising costs without a shipping platform like Shippit."
Frank Yang, IT Support Manager
Now, the logistics team at T&R Sports recognise Shippit as the backbone of every order they ship and a key competitive advantage to achieve the following results:
Support millions in annual revenue through a better-serviced network.
By replacing outdated manual workflows, T&R sports can run its last-mile delivery operations with ease. Shippit makes it easier to respond to a high volume of orders so T&R sports can speed up the time it takes to ship and deliver orders across the country. This has helped the team ensure every customer order wins customer satisfaction.
Optimised their order fulfilment process to save 65% on freight costs with a multi-carrier shipping strategy.
With instant, fast access to leading carriers, T&R sports can quickly access the best rates across multiple carriers and bulk book orders, all in one place. Not only has this improved their ability to identify bottlenecks in the network and switch on other carriers to avoid disruption, but they also have the freedom to decide how, when and where carriers are allocated.
Reduced the cost of each delivery by 10%
Shippit enables T&R sports to analyse where customers are purchasing from and reduce the distance travelled for each order across multiple shipments. Overall, this lowers the cost of each order shipped because now, T&R can use ship-from-store models to fulfil orders with inventory closest to their customers and avoid paying extra for an extended travel distance.
"Thanks to Shippit, our time as business owners are not spent managing the day-to-day of shipping and fulfilment. We have time to focus on growing our business and identifying growth opportunities."
Vic Jiang, Executive Officer
.webp)
