Toy manufacturer Wham-O, which makes the Frisbee, Slip ‘N Slide and Superball, among other products, discovered early on that launching an e-commerce site can be a bumpy ride.
“The big thing we learned is that if you have one small error in any one particular part of what you’re putting up, it can be very costly,” says Wham-O president Todd Richards. “We rushed to get to something that we wanted to do too soon, and now we’re making sure we have all those corrections made.”
Richards and his team began building Wham-O’s first direct-to-consumer e-commerce site in April.
Wham-O also makes the Hula Hoop brand.
The company launched Wham-o.com in late June, prior to July Fourth, and then took it offline after the holiday weekend ended. The short time the site was live allowed Wham-O to do some beta testing before launching its full site, which is set to go live later this month, Richards says.
The test launch revealed some issues, including inconsistent shipping costs. For instance, a shopper in Miami would pay more to have an item shipped to him than a customer in Seattle. Miami is farther than Seattle from California, where Wham-O is based, but Richards says Wham-O wanted shipping fees to be consistent.
“We were tying the shipping process to two outside vendors, and we found that part of the communication in the transaction wasn’t working correctly,” he says.
To remedy such software issues, Richards says he has brought all of the company’s e-commerce website in-house to minimize the potential for miscommunication.
“We have a full team of people running this whole thing—from the order coming in to our customer service to people processing the order to going to our warehouse—all within the same walls,” he says. Richards declines to specify some of the other hiccups Wham-O ran into during its initial site testing.
Privately held Intersport Corp. acquired the Wham-O brand along with Stallion Sport Ltd. in November 2015, according to a company press release. Richards says his team wanted to launch a Wham-O e-commerce site to give online shoppers a direct line to some of their favorite toys. Wham-O was founded in 1948, and the Frisbee was invented in 1957, followed by the Hula Hoop in 1958 and the Slip ‘N Slide water slide in 1961.
Wham-O is selling on Amazon.com Inc., No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 500, to bolster its online presence, Richards says. After Intersport acquired the Wham-O brand, he says he directed his team to work with Amazon to take off listings of Wham-O products that were not sold by the brand.
“The previous [Wham-O] management team had opened up to anyone and everyone that had an ability to market online,” he says. “You could go to Amazon six months ago and probably find two dozen Amazon stores or retailers that were carrying or marketing Wham-O products. Some of them were showing products that never went into production. Our e-commerce team spent two months just cleaning up the Amazon site.”
Richards says he and his e-commerce team will take a more disciplined approach when it comes to determining which Wham-O products are available on Amazon’s marketplace.
“We’re limiting it to some of our best-selling products, more that are related to our core brand so that there’s instant awareness,” he says. “We’re going to continue working with other third-party vendors that have a presence with Amazon, but we’re doing it in a limited fashion so a consumer will know who those are by the Wham-O official logo that gets applied to these online stores.”
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