PARTNERS IN GROWTH
From small partnerships built on trust and mutual understanding, big things grow – you need only look at the fruitful working relationship between EB Games and StarTrack.
Gaming software specialist EB Games turns 21 this year, celebrating that milestone with an expansion of its bricksand-mortar stores and its eCommerce business, as well as growing Zing Pop Culture, its merchandise offering. The company’s laser focus on its clientele – who are mostly passionate customers – has been central to its longevity, along with its ability to adapt quickly to new trends, technologies and expectations. EB Games has been a customer of Australia Post and StarTrack since their beginning and they see parallels in their shared customer-centric, innovationdriven approach. Andrew McDonald, Distribution Director for EB Games, shares his insights about the business and how StarTrack has been a key partner in its continued growth.
“We’ve worked closely and openly with StarTrack and they’ve been by our side to assist with forecasting and planning our needs.”
HISTORY IS A GREAT COACH
McDonald remembers EB Games before eCommerce, when the name of the game was being first to market. Shipping then was purely B2B: getting new stock to their own stores. He recalls bulk shipments of new games arriving at the Brisbane warehouse and “getting the delivery driver to wait while we quickly re-boxed and consigned the new titles... 30 minutes later, we’d load up the same truck for them to head back to the airport for an overnight delivery to our stores nationwide.” That agility was good training for the future disruption to the sector. “It’s a fast-paced industry and that principle of innovation and change was already ingrained in our company culture,” says McDonald. In the old days, retailers raced to be the first with a new game on the shelf. Now the “street date” is tightly managed. “The releases have much greater depth... one game is released across multiple platforms, perhaps in several iterations – maybe downloadable content, a SteelBook [a premium case] or a limited-edition statue. With one new release, we might be dealing with as many as 18 or 20 individual SKUs [stockkeeping units].”
ECOMMERCE ACTION
The EB Games eCommerce site was born in 2009. About 18 months ago, the company upped the logistics ante, working closely with StarTrack to bring ship-from-store to life. EB Games made its entire range available online, “almost doubling our range of product”, says McDonald. “If it’s available anywhere in Australia, we can ship it from that store. Customers don’t know if it’s coming from a warehouse or a store... but they do know there are a lot more products available to them.” EBGames.com.au and ZingPopCulture.com.au both use StarTrack’s fixed-price premium service and orders placed before 1pm are dispatched the same day and delivered the next. All stores have the ability to create StarTrack labels in-house to get the packages into the network and on their way to gamers around Australia.
THE PARTNERSHIP GAME
“We’ve worked closely and openly with StarTrack and they’ve been by our side to assist with forecasting and planning our needs,” says McDonald. StarTrack are able to react when there are sudden spikes in sales. An unexpected rush on a title means that, to replenish stock in stores, they’ll decide “to run a trailer direct from Brisbane to Sydney or Melbourne”, says McDonald. For eCommerce, too, “there are sometimes unusual spikes around new releases. Our needs vary greatly from day to day.” There’s no such thing as a “set-and-forget 3.30pm pick-up for our company’’, says McDonald. “We may have demand to ship 150 cages of B2C [business-to-consumer] freight and StarTrack reacts quickly, arranging different trucks, different times and multiple pick-ups. We haven’t been a customer of Australia Post and StarTrack for 21 years by accident. They really work hard at understanding our needs.”