Video Testimonial
I would 100% recommend Sellercloud for the ease, the convenience, and connections.
Online Sales Manager
Farwest Sports
Client since: 2018
Uses: Sellercloud, Shipbridge
Industry: Camping and hunting equipment
Founded: Mid-1960s
Headquarters: Fife, WA
Company Size: ~200 employees
Types of items sold: Outerwear, footwear, and outdoor gear. Hunting, camping, and fishing equipment. Firearms and ammunition.
“I would 100% recommend Sellercloud for the ease, the convenience, and connections.”
Kim Graves, Online Sales Manager, Farwest Sports
Before Sellercloud
Much has changed since Farwest Sports was founded 60 years ago in Washington state. Initially, they sold sporting clays; now, they have between 60,000 and 70,000 SKUs across multiple categories and operate from a 200,000 sq ft warehouse. “Probably the biggest selling product that we sell is our fishing gear,” explains Director of Online Sales Don Grier.
The family-owned business has been so successful that it launched a membership program with 30,000 people in the Puget Sound region and surrounding states and also takes wholesale orders.
When Grier started at Farwest Sports 19 and a half years ago, the company wasn’t doing much e-commerce. “We started out by selling gift cards, you know, to our customers and that was doing okay. We started adding products and we started seeing that, wow, this really works. And then from there it just kept growing,” Grier tells us.
A multichannel seller, Farwest Sports sells on a wide range of channels, from Amazon and Walmart (where they also utilize dropshipping) to Home Depot, Costco, Tractor Supply, Newegg, Rakuten, GunBroker, and Lowe’s, and through its website, Sportco.
The Challenge
When Farwest Sports started selling products online, they received 20 to 30 orders daily. Now, especially around the holiday season, receiving over 1,000 a day is not surprising. However, they were doing everything by hand. “We used to have to type everything in by hand. We used to have to do all the tracking by hand, email customers directly,” explains Online Information Manager Kent Mesford. It took multiple people hours a day, impacting their efficiency.
Managing multichannel orders by hand was particularly challenging. “We had to manage each one of these accounts—Amazon Seller Central, Walmart dropshipping, and all the other ones individually,” explains Grier. He adds that they even considered hiring one person per account to handle everything. Farwest Sports needed to stay on top of orders because each marketplace measures performance, and failing to adhere to its standards could harm its business.
Farwest Sports was also struggling with inventory management. Specifically, the software solutions they used for warehouse management, wholesale, and POS weren’t compatible, and information could not be shared between them. Getting a complete picture of their inventory was a mountain of a task. “I would have to dump a complete inventory file every morning, which took about an hour, and then coordinate that with the products we had on Amazon and the products we had in Walmart,” says Mesford.
A lot of time was lost uploading inventory separately to channels that could be better used elsewhere. Furthermore, Farwest Sports’s inability to track this inventory led to overselling. Mesford struggled to find ways to prevent that from happening, experimenting with different ways of dividing inventory across channels in the hopes that they wouldn’t oversell.
The Solution
Discovering Sellercloud was a major relief for Farwest Sports. Grier was astounded at how many areas of their business could be automated. “Sellercloud has completely streamlined how we do things, from how inventory flows up to all these different channels to how orders flow down and go straight into our ERP system,” he said.
By eliminating manual tasks, Farwest Sports’s workload has significantly decreased. Before, they used to have a full office dedicated to handling marketplace orders. “Now I’m down to four employees, including myself,” says Grier.
For Mesford, the biggest reason Farwest Sports started using Sellercloud was to have a single place where they could send inventory and no longer deal with the and stop the disconnect between their different software solutions. “We can run everything through a central inventory repository or inventory control center,” said Mesford, adding that because inventory is constantly updated through Sellercloud, he no longer has to manually split inventory across channels, which means no more gigantic inventory reports, relieving him of several hours a week of unnecessary work. Plus, now they always know how much available inventory is listed on each channel, and the chances of overselling are significantly lower.
Farwest Sports were also huge fans of Sellercloud’s shipping app, Shipbridge, which is free for Sellercloud users and integrates with all major carriers, such as UPS, FedEx, and USPS. “It’s one of the best shipping programs out there,” says Grier. “Shipbridge blew our minds,” says Online Sales Manager Kim Graves. What they found particularly impressive about Shipbridge is that it integrates so well with Sellercloud and sends tracking information back to each of their channels.
The customization Sellercloud offers was another tremendous benefit, and it enabled Farwest Sports to overcome some of its most frustrating technical challenges. Mesford recalls how one of the solutions they were working with could only handle items in the Ascii character system, which was problematic because Amazon, Walmart, and other channels use more advanced coding. “I called up Sellercloud and said, ‘hey, can you build us a plugin to convert everything to Ascii?’” said Mesford, “and within two or three days we had it.”
Graves was impressed with how everything could be connected up to Sellercloud, whether through their APIs or EDI. “They’re going to get you connected in ways that you didn’t think were possible,” she said. Sellercloud even built an API connection for Farwest Sports and GunBroker, which gave them a channel to sell their firearms, which they could not sell on Amazon.
Lastly, Mesford adds that an enormous benefit of using Sellercloud is that it allows you time to focus on creating and marketing your store and website.
After Sellercloud
The transformation that has taken place at Farwest Sports has been enormous since they started using Sellercloud. Graves remembers how, before Sellercloud, there would be times they’d work long hours into the evening or even seven days a week. Today, Farwest Sports would never return to how things used to be. “The idea that you would have a website and have to do everything manually now is just insane,” says Mesford. Farwest Sports is so impressed with Sellercloud that they are now exploring how they can run their whole business through their software.
Grier also feels that Farwest Sports benefits from Sellercloud’s close relationship with Amazon and Walmart. “Both [Walmart and Amazon] recognize Sellercloud as being a really big player,” he says. “Amazon calls us saying, ‘hey, we see that you’re using Sellercloud. Would you please try this new feature?’”
Farwest Sports also feels confident that it can depend on Sellercloud whenever it needs assistance. Graves notes that every time they’ve needed to contact support, “they’ve gone above and beyond like, oh, we don’t typically do this, but here’s how you could do or here’s a workaround or stuff like that,” says Graves. Mesford notes that Sellercloud is very responsive if they ever need to request custom work. They also appreciate how hands-on Sellercloud CEO Jeremy Greenberg is.
“I would 100% recommend Sellercloud for the ease, the convenience, and connections,” says Graves, who says that as the e-commerce market inevitably grows, Farwest Sports will continue to grow with Sellercloud.
