BartonFlyer wrote:See here for the rentals in the TC http://www.traffordcentre.co.uk/corporate/lettings/12regentcrescent You're starting at OVER £1/4 million a year plus nearly £90 grand rates! Yes there are smaller units but I doubt Peel would be interested in offering any at a discount to SCR as their other customers would start asking for discount too! Warrington or Wigan (or anybody else) have all the chances they want to get a unit in the Trafford Centre, there are plenty for rent - but they don't seem to be there - I wonder why not? I say bring back the cubicle on the precinct from yesteryear, find a new version of Miss Monks and her perfect pins and you'll be onto a winner. Pretty certain i've mentioned it before but I still think it's a good idea and something the club should be actively persueing, with the Beeb moveing so many personel up to Salford and the surrounding areas surely there is scope to target some of these people with cheaper tickets and what have you to see if we can get some of them interested in the club as it is the sole fully professional team from thier adopted new home town.

BartonFlyer wrote:See here for the rentals in the TC http://www.traffordcentre.co.uk/corporate/lettings/12regentcrescent You're starting at OVER £1/4 million a year plus nearly £90 grand rates! Yes there are smaller units but I doubt Peel would be interested in offering any at a discount to SCR as their other customers would start asking for discount too! Warrington or Wigan (or anybody else) have all the chances they want to get a unit in the Trafford Centre, there are plenty for rent - but they don't seem to be there - I wonder why not? I say bring back the cubicle on the precinct from yesteryear, find a new version of Miss Monks and her perfect pins and you'll be onto a winner. Pretty certain i've mentioned it before but I still think it's a good idea and something the club should be actively persueing, with the Beeb moveing so many personel up to Salford and the surrounding areas surely there is scope to target some of these people with cheaper tickets and what have you to see if we can get some of them interested in the club as it is the sole fully professional team from thier adopted new home town.

a small unit in the lowry anyone?

all these i feel are good ideas but i am but i am expecting someone to tell me why its hasnt been doing, isnt being done, or never will be done because of reasons x,y and z
i feel many posters on here have strong opinions about what should be done but dont actually look into the reasons why it isnt/wont be being done!

Retailing is a very very competetive area in our society these days, there is phenomenal expertise and experience involved in setting up a successful retail operation and it is somewhat naive to think you can just set up a stall and make money on the scale that is need for it to be really significant for an operation like SCR, without that expertise.

That said, everyone in retail started somewhere!

I think that it is probably stating the obvious to say that Salford's fundamental problem is the size of the fan base (and no that's not Big Pev's shirt size ) so until that is addressed I think any retail operation is going to be pretty restricted - what's the size of our target market i.e. how many individuals will actually buy anything from SCR in a year ? 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 ? my guess is that 3,000 is optimistic, but let's use that as a working figure.

The first thing you have to do is maximise the revenue from the willing customers that you do have - we've chosen to give shirts to the season ticket holders, lets say 2,000 of them, so maybe the remaining 1,000 will buy a shirt each and half the season ticket holders will also buy another shirt - so 2,000 shirts at £50 (average adult & junior) - thats £100,000 income - margin 60% (? don't actually know), but if that's right then thats £60,000 profit (hmmm - a bit far away for a £250,000 rent in the Trafford Centre!)

Then we need to target people who don't currently buy anything:

1: Existing fans
2: Away fans
3: Others

How to do that? It's called marketing and it costs money! You have to create the "I want one" feel about the merchandise. It never ceases to amaze me how many folk will wear Brazil shirts, or Barcelona shirts who have no actual connection to either but who buy into the brand. Now could Salford ever become such a brand? Tough call I suspect.

So where does this train of thought lead? Well, first you have to manage your costs to suit the size and scale of the operation - is a bricks & mortar shop ever going to make real money - if the answer is no then we just souldn't have one! In my opinion (and I think Chico challenged me a while back on the feasibility), the ONLY way forward is online - the cost of entry is small, you can outsource the fulfillment and order processing and you get world-wide coverage instantly (albeit competing with a few other sites!)

You may take exception with the numbers I've used, they are complete guesswork, but whatever anyone comes up with you must do that kind of projection to see if the idea is viable

Right I'll stop rambling and get back to the red wine (it's official now it's good for you!!!!)

thats a great post beacause for people like me ( i know the basics of business) but wouldnt of been able to put that down to paper as such.

i think the online/order route could be a possible way to go, but it think i would have to go with the online aspect being a seperate site to the club one but obviously the 'online shop' link would lead you to the said site
this is entirely because of the amount of time it takes the thing to load up on reds.co.uk

we are living in a virtual world and we need to try to use that to our advantage! , i also like the idea of having some kind of retail presence in the salford quays area could be beneficial in targeting 'new customers'(bbc workers) and also because it isnt no salford precinct, its a much nicer area and would give a much more positive look on the whole scheme of things

Moving away from what I said last time about internet access, one thing to add here regards online sales conversion. Rule of thumb is that 5% of your website's visitors will buy something if people want what you're selling. Now, that percentage is skewed by auction websites and let's say banks because for those markets sales conversion is high — over 10%. The sports market tends to be around 1.5%; speciality goods around 3.5%.

Let's just say, for example, the new home shirt comes out and for a limited time only retails at £35. That's an attractive offer. So if you had 1000 unique visitors to your website every week, you expect to sell between 10 and 30 shirts every week. Similarly 100 uniques could equal 1–3 shirt sales a week.

Therefore depending on your visitor demographic and stats, online shops can be a boon or a bit of damp squib. As BartonFlyer says though, if the setup cost is relatively small, then you may as well offer the service regardless.

i hope the club take not of this thread, like you say at leat offer the service i know my dad in new zealand would almost certainly buy things of the site, and there are many other salford ex pats who dont have access to the club anymore like they once did

Again it's another suggestion i've mooted before but I still say it stands as being worthy of being investigated by the club.

Salford and Manchester has a huge student population and i'm willing to bet that marketing and some form of commercial studies are prominent as topics of learning. for me the club should approach the universirty who actually have something along these lines on thier list of studies and see if they can help by letting the students invest some of thier study time into looking at ,arketing. It has to be a worthy idea as trying to market a club who treads water at best and offers limit goods for sale to a small fan base is a challenge and should one bright spark hit on a winning idea it would surely look good for them when they qualify and look for real work in the marketing sector.

Another factor that I find personally to be a problem is that I brought a friend to a game last year who didnt mind the admission price but nearly soiled themselves when they queued for 10 minutes for beers only to find that they horrendously over charged for look warm canned stuff poured into a plastic glass, we have a massive drinking establishment nailed onto the side of the club surely they can come up with a method of getting this right, I did suggest to the club once that they have mobile backpack based beer sales in the ground and if my ageing memory isnt totally gone they did infact introduce this only for a few random knobs to ruin it for the rest by launching the empties onto the pitch.

Now is the time to plan for the future.

Lets assume the stadium and retail gets built.

The club shop should be in a prominant position facing theother retail, happy staff with product knowledge and a love of the agme should be used.

The shop should have an area suitable for people to meet, maybe have a drink or coffee with dvds of old games. make it the place to be for fans.

Products

Well how about actually asking the fans what they would buy?
ensure the quality some of the t shirts have been like old rags recently.

Invest in a t shirt printing machine, this will enable the transfers to be added and means less stock.

On line and out of hours we need to ahve the shop open late on a regular basis, maybe this could tie in with FR meetings, or have the oportunity to purchase/order items at meetings.

get a new marketing guru, this current bloke seemed clueless.

Cracking idea. I did this myself during my PR degree, and there will be hundreds of students in the Salford/Manchester Uni's willing to work on a voluntary basis in order to gain some relevant work experience.
It's win-win. It costs the club nothing and they get a fresh pair of eyes from someone hungry to prove themselves in the industry, and the student gets some real work experience to place on their CV alongside their studies.

It would cetainly enable me to buy merchandise... I get back up to Salford about twice a year and not always at times when the club shop is open.