DICK’S Sporting Goods and the Magic of Store Mode: Athletes, Apps, and Innovation

DICK’S Sporting Goods is a company dedicated to enhancing the satisfaction of athletes and outdoor enthusiasts. Committed to aiding individuals in the pursuit of their sporting and outdoor aspirations, the company serves as a destination equipped with all the necessities for sports and outdoor activities.

The top omnichannel retailer caters to athletes and outdoor enthusiasts through a network of over 850 stores, including DICK’S Sporting Goods, Golf Galaxy, Public Lands, Moosejaw, Going Going Gone!, and Warehouse Sale. Additionally, they serve customers through online channels. DICK’S extends its reach further by owning and managing DICK’S House of Sport and Golf Galaxy Performance Center. Moreover, they operate GameChanger, a mobile platform for youth sports that facilitates live streaming, scheduling, communications, and scorekeeping. They’ve also developed an app to make their customer’s shopping and sports experience as smooth as possible. 

In 2021, DICK’S decided to make their app even better. They wanted to connect the app with their physical stores to make it easy for athletes to shop. That’s when they faced a challenge – how to make the app work seamlessly with the store.

The product team required a strong, developer-friendly location infrastructure that could offer the necessary observability and analytics to boost confidence in their solution and enable a speedy launch. It was then that DICK’S turned to Radar to help them. Radar is a sophisticated location technology platform designed to empower businesses with enhanced geospatial capabilities for their mobile applications. Leveraging advanced geofencing and location-based insights, Radar enables companies to seamlessly integrate location-aware features into their apps, delivering personalized and contextually relevant experiences to users. 

By choosing Radar, DICK’s not only discovered a flexible platform but also gained a strategic partner to support the ongoing development of inventive and seamless omnichannel athlete experiences.

Picture this: You walk into a DICK’S store, and your phone’s app senses it. Suddenly, it transforms into Store Mode, enabling you to do all sorts of amazing things right from your app, including:

• Scan Product Barcodes: You can point your phone at a product, and the app gives you all the product details you need. 
• Find Products in the Store: If you can’t find something, the app helps you locate it, and if it’s not in the store, it can even ship it to your home for free.
• Earn Loyalty Points: When you buy things, you can scan your special barcode to earn points that will give you special rewards.
• Access Favorites and Rewards: All the things you love and special offers are right there at your fingertips.

In the initial months after the launch, more than 70% of app users permitted location access, and 8% of the company’s entire user base engaged with Store Mode, resulting in hundreds of thousands of comprehensive shopping experiences across various channels.

DICK’S recognizes that omnichannel athletes are among its most valuable customers, spending more than twice as much as those who use a single channel. Interestingly, a significant majority of orders placed through Store Mode are delivered straight to the athlete’s home. Store Mode serves not only as a strategy to secure a sale at the moment but also enhances the potential long-term value of an athlete by facilitating purchases across multiple channels.