3 Observations about Discounts from Football Clubs’ Online Merchandise Stores
Football clubs and their online merchandise stores have been on our radar for some time now. After a few sit downs and calls with clubs in the Premier League, Championship and the two lower leagues, where we spoke to the Head of Retail or Merchandising and/or Commercial Director, we wanted to take a closer look.
Following which we decided to start monitoring football clubs’ online merchandise stores and track their level of discounts throughout the season. One thing we clearly identified is that football clubs’ merchandise stores and discounts seem to be something that go hand in hand. To the extent that, all clubs within the Premier League have been slashing prices since the start of the New Year.
Following our analysis of football clubs’ online merchandise stores, I’ve drawn 3 observations which I found very interesting.
1) Which discount % is the most popular?
I tracked the % discount that each store was offering every week of every month since January 2017. The bar chart below shows that a 50% discount is by far the most popular amongst online merchandise stores.
I’ve taken a few snapshots of some football club stores to support this finding.
Bear in mind that these discount %’s fluctuate at certain points; however what’s worth noting is that rather than clubs deciding to gradually increase the discount as the season progresses, a few clubs started offering discounts in the range of 70% at the start of January. They then dropped them back to 35% by the first week of February, once January sales ended.
Whether this was done to deal with the lack of demand in January or to match other clubs, I do not know. However, it begs the question, why would a club slash prices so early on in the season?
2) During which month where discounts highest?
Before conducting the research, my initial thought was that discounts would be at their highest during January (the month of sales), however although that was not the case, January did rank as second place for the highest collective discounts.
After analyzing the data it seems that there is a direct correlation between the season drawing to a close and discount %’s increasing.
Football clubs usually tend to launch their kit for the upcoming season towards the end of the current season. As a result clubs are ‘forced’ to get rid of as much stock as possible before the season ends and next season’s kit is available for purchase.
The data revealed that discounts were at their highest during the month of April; however after taking a closer look at each individual club, there are a few football clubs whose merchandise is cheaper during the month of May.
The main reason for April having the highest collective discounts rather than May, is due to the fact that some clubs stop selling this season’s kit and start promoting next season’s. As a result there is, naturally, less discounting on apparel.
The reasoning here, I imagine, would be for club’s to focus on next season’s potential gains rather than this season’s losses.
3) Do discounts bring about more traffic?
We analyzed the traffic of all the football club merchandise stores in the Premier League and I was able to identify that there is a direct link between clubs increasing their discounts and, in turn, bringing in more traffic.
However whether the traffic increase was due to clubs sending out more emails, running more marketing campaigns and/or looking to drive traffic to their store by advertising their discounts, is not something I was able to track.
By taking a look at the below graph, you can see that clubs’ stores had the highest flow of traffic during April, with the total traffic for Premier League club stores amounting to 2,090,817 visitors. We’re still in the month of May, so unfortunately I was not able to track the traffic for this month as yet.
As always we’d be happy to listen to your feedback and thoughts on the subject.
If you’d like further insight into how we gathered the data and analysed it feel free to contact us on www.discountif.com, or our email contact@discountif.com
