Sports supplement retailer Predator Nutrition was born from founder and owner Reggie Johal’s personal background of athleticism and personal training. In 2004, upon improving his own diet and incorporating supplements from the United States, his methods began gaining the interest of his associates.
“People were asking me where I was getting my supplements from, and I would say ‘I am buying them from America,’ because at that time they were not available in the UK,” said Johal. “They saw the results in myself and asked me if I could get those products for them—and I realized there were many people who would come to me for advice in nutrition, training and then supplements.”
From that realization, Reggie launched his now enterprise retail operation, bringing supplement products for distribution in the UK for people like him, looking to improve their performance.
As the retailer began evolving into a business supporting international commerce, their initial ecommerce start proved to be insufficient given their developing needs. Predator Nutrition needed a new degree of scalability to grow into new markets, and better serve existing ones.
Identifying the Problem
Johal identified poor integration between systems as being the root cause for lost sales, as well as inventory and presentation issues, and set out to replace all of their systems.
“Above and beyond what I would expect, I am fairly confident that if we succeed in solving the current issues, we will immediately see a sustained increase both in consumers’ loyalty and in sales,” said Johal. “And for the future, we’re looking to ultimately provide a website which is going to complement our expansion.”
Johal wanted to replace Predator Nutrition’s back-end systems, including NetSuite (their OMS ERP), and a system called FreshDesk, used as their customer service or ticketing system.
An Omnichannel Strategy
“What we are doing is implementing Salesforce as their CRM, so it’s going to take over the customer service functionality, but also introduce a 360° view of the customer,” said John Sanders, Project Manager from OSF.
Then, OSF would set out to perform a Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation structured in two phases, enabling Predator Nutrition to be online as soon as possible with a robust website.
With OSF, Predator Nutrition started its implementation of Salesforce and an SAP integration serving as their new ERP system, followed by its connection with their new Commerce Cloud platform. Johal expects to gain a better view of his existing customers as well as support for growth into new markets—the next being the U.S.—through multicurrency functionality, optimized through Commerce Cloud.
“The level of data migration is substantial compared to most standards,” said Sanders. “There is constant communication going back and forth about meeting their goals, and we are maintaining the agility to respond.”
Upon implementation, Salesforce is integrated with ExactTarget, which gives Predator Nutrition full marketing capabilities. Also, Salesforce is used for their sales reps, raising orders and keeping their entire list of products and inventory, the order lists of customers and customer service functions. Sales reps can immediately see their order history in one place.
“We’re already seeing improvements in conversions and cart abandonment, so I’m optimistic about our ecommerce performance as we expand into international markets.”
Additionally, the retailer has replaced NetSuite with SAP as their back-end OMS ERP system. The new system holds all of their inventory and financial information, as well as performs all of their dispatching and order picking in the warehouse. Much of this information is stored with SAP and pushed out to the other systems, like Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
“We solve these problems by building interfaces that are going to update the stock levels, multiple times a day to provide very accurate information on the Commerce Cloud website,” said Sanders. “And Salesforce is giving them all the information they need to know about any customer, at the point they call in for service.”
As an exclusive distributor to the European Union, Reggie continues to keep an eye on products that haven’t been made available in the UK, and products that incorporate new ingredients otherwise unavailable to his developed—and expanding—customer base.
“OSF has remained flexible enough to adjust to changing requirements of our solution as they developed,” said Johal. “Now, we’re making substantial investments for the future to make sure that we provide the best possible services to our existing and future customers.”
