Trading since 2004, Tackle Discounts have become one of the largest online fishing retailers in the UK.

Created through a passion and knowledge of the sport, they are now shipping specialist fishing products to over 60 countries through their website and marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.

Within four months of opening Tackle Discounts moved to larger premises, and as a result of the continued rapid growth of their business they’ve moved and expanded a further three times. Since 2004, Tackle Discounts have doubled their turnover annually.

With a product range of several thousand SKUs and hundreds of orders per day it became evident that the fulfilment operation was nearing saturation and if not managed closely would soon start to effect quality and ultimately customer feedback and sales.

The customer's requirements were very concise.

• find a fulfilment partner that can be trusted to handle their business. 'They had no previous experience of outsourcing'
  
• free up time to allow them to concentrate on growing their business.
  
• reduce their overall costs.
  
• provide a tailored cost structure that enables them to sell items from 99p to £9999.
  
• have no negative impact on service and feedback during implementation.
  

With little knowledge of the fishing sector is was imperative that we understood the breadth and depth of the customers range and their aspirations for the future. A small project team was implanted into the business for 2 weeks with the aim to fully understand the current operation, the systems being used, and to make recommendations on the solution to be provided and its implementation plan.

In total, the analysis, relocation and implementation of Tackle Discounts into our fulfilment centre took 6 weeks.

The key milestones during the implementation were the:

• integration of the customers ChannelAdvisor and Metapack systems with our SKUPick Order Processing System.
  
• audit and movement of 10,000 items from the customer's premises to our fulfilment centre.
  
• allocation and application of over 5,000 EAN/UPC barcode labels.
  
• appropriate storage of 10,000 items in pallet, floor, carton and small pick faces.
  
• implementation of an automatic stock re-ordering system.
  
• delivery of an integrated EPOS system for the customer retail outlet.
  

In summary the solution provided to Tackle Discounts:

• encompasses SKUs of varying volumetrics, stock holding and fragility using our multi-option storage environment.
  
• is scalable with business growth and seasonality through the use of our flexible warehousing and staffing profile.
  
• demonstrates a measurable improvement in picking accuracy. We guarantee we are 100% accurate.
  
• is seamlessly integrated with ChannelAdvisor and Metapack for order processing and consignment tracking.
  
• has reduced delivery costs by more than £1 per order.
  
• now facilitates the same day despatch of orders placed before 2pm.
  
• provides full visibility of stock and has automated the re-ordering process.
  
• has already enabled the customer to double their range of SKUs.
  
• has transformed their management of sales through the retail outlet via a barcode driven EPOS system.