Online sales increased 19% year over year in the first full quarter of sales from the relaunched DicksSportingGoods.com.

Online sales soared 19% in the second quarter over the prior-year quarter for Dick’s Sporting Goods, while same-store sales inched up a disappointing 0.1%.

The web accounted for 9.5% of sales for Dick’s in Q2, versus 8.5% in the same period last year. While the sports supplies retailer did not report online sales in dollars, that suggests web sales totaled about $205 million in the three-month period ended July 29.

The huge guidance cut implies that Amazon is a much bigger threat than initially anticipated by management.

“In this very competitive and dynamic marketplace, we were able to deliver a significant increase in our bottom line from last year,” chairman and CEO Edward W. Stack said in a statement released along with the financial results. “We continued to capture market share and generated strong results in e-commerce, footwear and golf, although sales were pressured by weakness in hunting, licensed and athletic apparel. By design, we will be more promotional and increase our marketing efforts for the remainder of the year, as we will aggressively protect our market share.”

Management projected same-store sales for the year would range from flat to “a low single-digit decline,” after increasing 3.5% in 2016.

advertisement

A note from investment firm L&F Capital Management said the projection of slow growth ahead suggests Dick’s is losing sales to Amazon.com Inc. at a faster rate than the company expected. “The huge guidance cut implies that Amazon is a much bigger threat than initially anticipated by management,” the note said.

While Amazon does not report its sales by category, marketing firm One Click Retail estimates that Amazon sold $5.5 billion worth of sporting goods in 2016 in the United States, approximately 4.6% of the $120 billion U.S. outdoor and sporting goods market. The firm says Amazon’s sales in the category increased 20% year over year, compared with growth of 5% for the outdoor and sporting goods category as a whole.

Those figures suggest Amazon is the largest U.S. online seller of sporting goods. Dick’s leads in web sales among retailers that specialize in sporting goods, but its 2016 online sales were $942.7 million, less than one-fifth Amazon’s sporting goods sales as estimated by One Click Retail. Dick’s is No. 56 in the Internet Retailer Top 1000 ranking of North America’s leading online retailers. Amazon is No. 1.

advertisement

The second quarter was the first full three-month period since the retailer relaunched DicksSportingGoods.com on internally managed technology. Online sales for Dick’s grew only 11% in the first quarter, and the retailer said at the time that it had cut back on online marketing while it ramped up the new e-commerce site. The retailer’s website for years was operated by the former GSI Commerce, which eBay Inc. purchased in 2011 and folded into its eBay Enterprise technology unit. EBay spun off the eBay Enterprise unit in 2015.

Stack told analysts that moving to its own e-commerce site had improved profitability by the expected 25 to 30 basis points, .25% to .30%, but that heightened price competition cut into profits. The retailer’s gross profit margin declined to 29.61% in the second quarter from 30.13% in the same period a year earlier.

When asked about Nike Inc. beginning to sell on Amazon.com this summer, chief financial officer Lee Belitsky replied that Dick’s maintains a good relationship with Nike, a major supplier of products that Dick’s and other sporting goods retailer sell. “This is a test, we’ll see how this goes,” Belitsky says of Nike selling a limited selection of items on Amazon, according to a transcript of the analysts call provided by SeekingAlpha. “They’ve been transparent talking to us about this test. And I suspect it will probably go well, and then Nike will decide what they want to do about it and how they want to handle the balance of the market.”

For the second quarter ended July 29, Dick’s Sporting Goods reported:

advertisement
  • Net sales of $2.157 billion, an increase of 9.6% from $1.968 billion during the same period last year.
  • Net income of $112.39 million, up 22.9% from $91.42 million.

For the first six months of its fiscal year, Dick’s reported:

  • Net sales of $3.982 billion, an increase of 9.8% from $3.628 billion during the prior-year period.
  • Net income grew 15.0% to $170.58 million from $148.29 million.

While Dick’s does not break out web sales in dollars, its estimate of e-commerce penetration for the first two fiscal quarters suggest online sales totaled about $375 million.

Favorite