In March 1998, Eastbay converted its informational website into an active e-commerce site. Allowing the facilitation of international product transactions, the website attributed tremendous growth in direct online sales. Eastbay as a large supplier of athletic footwear offers a far wider distribution of basketball shoes and brands, compared to other online and offline competitors. This ensures that Eastbay satisfies the segments needs and wants for a wider range of performance enhancing basketball shoes in order to compete at the top level in the sport. Eastbay also attributes growth in direct online sales due to its ability to provide lower prices compared to other channels. The benefit of offering lower priced basketball shoes will be discussed further in ‘Save’.
Featuring top athletic basketball brands such as Adidas, Nike, Jordan’s, Puma and PF Flyers, just to name a few, the website advances a wide range of basketball brands and distinctive performance qualities for the segment to choose from. Professional Athlete basketball shoe models are an addition to the website not readily available through other competitor channels, including Kobe Bryant and Derrick Rose shoe models, as they are always available on the website (Eastbay 2013). As the basketball players in the target segment are dedicated fans, they are more inclined to purchase celebrity endorsed shoes as sport celebrities are often are depicted as larger than life (Hartmann et al., 2008). Additionally a sports celebrity can encourage fans to generalise their attachment from him/her to an endorsed firm or brand (Brooks and Harris 1998; Jowdy and McDonald 2002; Rubin and McHugh 1987)
Eastbay’s website can be used to support the purchase decision even if the purchase does not occur via the website. For example Eastbay has a prominent web-specific phone number on their website (Eastbay 2013) allowing the segment to ring a representative in the call centre to place their order. This has the benefit that Eastbay is less likely to lose the business of customers in the segment who are anxious about the security of online ordering when purchasing basketball shoes, and Eastbay can track sales that result partly from the website according to the numbers of callers on this line. Similarly basketball players can visit Footlocker outlet stores to try on particular basketball shoes before the actual purchase transaction online through footlockers subsidiary Eastbay. Considering how the consumers in the segment can change from one channel to another during the purchase process, this is referred to as Mixed-mode buying (Chaffey &Ellis Chadwick 2012). Furthermore According to Peterson, Balasubramanian, and Bronenberg (1997, pp.329-346) a website provides the capacity of inexpensively storing vast amounts of information, graphics and video in different
