How Dick’s fulfills 80% of online orders from its stores’ shelves

The advantages of shipping online orders from retail stores rather than warehouses and distribution centers are perhaps too obvious to mention, but since when did we let that stop us?

As Walmart notes on the website for its GoLocal delivery service platform, shipping from stores saves retailers money on building or renting warehouses, not to mention shipping to customers more swiftly and cheaply since their stores are likely to be closer to customers than regional distribution centers.

Leave it to a sports retailer to take the ball and run with it, and that’s exactly what Dick’s Sporting Goods has done when it comes to shipping from stores. Today Dick’s ships 80% of its online orders from its ~900 stores, up from 70% in 2021.

Dick’s has “transformed their stores into fulfillment engines,” Diego Mazzitelli, VP of technology at Globant, an IT services company that partners the sports retailer, said from the stage at a session at the recent NRF conference.

As the industry beats the drum for the omnichannel approach, wherein consumers can seamlessly switch between online and in-store shopping, Dick’s serves as “a true example of a retailer that converted omnichannel into an operation model, not just a strategy,” Mazzitelli said.

Jeremy Graham, VP of engineering for athlete technology at Dick’s, joined Mazzitelli onstage, and said the retailer relies on collaboration between the e-commerce and store teams, with store associates on the hook for picking, packing, and shipping the orders.

“We have a huge day online, and we all get excited [but] that’s a lot of promises we have to keep from our stores tomorrow,” Graham said. “So how do we thoughtfully set up our stores for success to execute on the back end, and that plays into labor scheduling [and having the] right people, right roles in the store…because if any of those go wrong, the experience starts to fall apart.”

Leave only footprints: Dick’s is not the only retailer to tout its store-fulfillment numbers:

• “Fun fact: Our stores fulfill 95% of our digital orders,” Target states on its website.
• Walmart “has a unique competitive advantage using its store footprint to fulfill customer orders, fulfilling more than 50% of orders from stores,” the retailer says on its GoLocal website.

With so many locations across the US, store fulfillment is a “no-brainer” for Dick’s, Graham said during the session, referring to customers as “athletes” as is the retailer’s custom.

“We have this differentiator, which is our stores, and they’re all over the country, and they’re close to our athletes,” he said. “Why would we not use those as a space to fulfill orders and compete with others who are getting orders out faster?”

Dick’s is widely lauded as being on the forefront of experiential retail thanks to its House of Sport concept stores, where customers can try out products using such amenities as in-store batting cages and climbing walls. But here’s the challenge Dick’s and other retailers face when they fulfill so many orders from their stores: How does a store’s retail floor double as a warehouse, with associates continuously picking items off shelves to fulfill online orders, without seeming like a warehouse where shoppers are getting in the way?

Graham said one way Dick’s avoids such logjams is by mapping specific routes for associates to gather orders unobtrusively.

“We don’t want teammates walking around the store circling,” Graham said. “So we built tech that’s like, ‘Here’s your path to pick.’”