GameStop Online Orders

When video game and consumer electronics retailer GameStop Corp. began to test shipping online orders from stores in March 2015 it quickly realized that the new fulfillment option would help drive more online orders by presenting customers—gamers eager to snap up rare, vintage or hard-to-find video games—with a much wider assortment of products, says Richard Armour, senior director of multichannel for GameStop.

Because GameStop, No. 45 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide allows its avid gaming clientele to buy, sell and trade video games at it stores, GameStop stores have greater product variety than its warehouses, Armour says. That includes vintage and rare video games, Armour says.

Once the retailer realized the potential of shipping products from stores, it knew it needed more robust technology to run such a program. The in-house system it used for its test wouldn’t work.

“We started with a homegrown solution,” Armour says. “It was pretty scrappy and we needed something to support [ship from store] on much larger scale. It very quickly became apparent this would be a key pillar of our omnichannel strategy as it significantly increased our online assortment.”

The retailer decided to use a service from vendor eBay Enterprise, an e-commerce services provider that has since been renamed Radial, to implement ship from store at its 4,000 GameStop locations. It began rolling out the fulfillment option to stores in October 2015 and completed the project in February 2016, says Jay Rodriguez, manager of the operations team at the retailer.