Sports Unlimited Morphs From Lone Store to Web Operation

Sports Unlimited, a small Philadelphia-area sporting goods retailer, has gradually transformed itself from a one location mall merchant to an online business with a more than 10% annual growth rate and about 15,000 hits a day.

Through the process, the company has tried to keep its organic rankings high on the major search engines, a strategy it has found more profitable than pay-per-click advertising and listing itself on shopping sites, says Michael Neff, Web site manager.

Right now, Sports Unlimited is also experimenting with an affiliate marketing program.

Over the past nine years, the family owned firm has grown into a presence on search engines through sportsunlimitedinc.com, says Neff.

The online sales dominance has been the case for about the past three years, he notes.

“It sort of evolved that way but now it’s a conscious decision because we’re able to compete against larger [sporting goods] businesses out there on a level playing field,” says Neff.

Plymouth Meeting, PA Sports Unlimited sells fitness equipment, gear for all the major sports, licensed products and apparel. Its customers are mostly consumers but it does business with institutions like schools and churches.

“Most of our sales are through Google,” says Neff, noting high rankings with such phrases as “ping pong tables” and “rowing machine.” On Google earlier this week, “ping pong tables” and “outdoor ping pong tables” ranked numbers two and three. The firm is also listed on Yahoo and MSN.

Sports Unlimited also uses a bit of pay-per-click through Overture and AdWords but, “we have just had better success with concentrating on natural search,” he says.

The company is also checking out affiliate marketing programs. “We’ve just started one, Sortprice.com and we’re only in the third month of it,” says Neff. “It’s been working out okay so far but I’m not sure” how well it’s going to perform, he says.

One vehicle that has not worked is shopping sites.

“I’ve tried Pricegrabber, NextAg and Bizrate in the past and they have not worked,” Neff says. “Our return on investment was very low.

“These companies just increased their pay-per-click [charges] and it just got to the point where we had so many clicks that when we finally got a sale it wouldn’t make up for the amount of clicks we had on it,” he says. “We had already wasted all our profit.”