Unlocking two new revenue streams for the world’s largest sporting goods retailer

With more than 2,000 stores in 60 countries, Decathlon is the largest sporting goods retailer in the world, bringing in approximately $16 billion in annual revenue.

As an innovative, vertically integrated company that designs, develops, and patents its own products, Decathlon certainly does its research. So when it came time to expand its U.S. marketplace operations four years ago, Tony Leon—the Chief Technology Officer of Decathlon USA—was very deliberate in finding the right solution to support the company’s growth.

After a lengthy testing process of nearly 30 feed management platforms, Leon said the company ultimately selected Feedonomics because it had all the capabilities to support Decathlon’s ecommerce efforts.

“So we had this need of being able to push a feed of products and being able to synchronize orders back to our systems and back to the marketplace when, for example, they were shipped,” said Leon. “So we were looking for a platform that could do that, and also at the same time, we had an opportunity to improve and automate our feed for all the marketing platforms like Google, Pinterest, Meta, and all those kinds of guys.”

Leon cites Feedonomics’ 24/7 reliability, customer service, and continuous innovation as the reasons why Decathlon has maintained its partnership. Feedonomics is now a key part of what Leon refers to as “building a house.”

“It’s like a toolbox, basically—every time you can find an existing tool, you just add it to your toolbox,” Leon said. “So you can go faster. And you build your house, not the tools themselves. So for me, Feedonomics is like that—it’s a tool that helps you build your house faster.”

Going to market faster while saving money

Leon described Decathlon’s foray into the U.S. ecommerce market as an “exploration project” that allowed the company to test new technologies, new ways of selling, and new opportunities.

In Europe, Decathlon’s website functions similarly to a marketplace like Amazon, where other brands list and sell products alongside Decathlon’s. In the U.S., the company’s operations were comparatively small, so Decathlon made the strategic decision to improve its visibility by selling products on Walmart Marketplace and Target Plus.

Prior to Feedonomics, Decathlon had tested a simple Shopify-to-Walmart app that Leon found clunky and unreliable for order management. Due to challenges that many sellers are familiar with—channel integration, specific data requirements, and data synchronization—Decathlon looked to Feedonomics to make its marketplace efforts sustainable and efficient.

Feedonomics has out-of-the-box integrations with the top ecommerce sales channels, and Leon said not having to build connections to each marketplace’s APIs saved the company substantial money and sped up its time to market.

“If we had to build all those connections to the marketplaces, to Meta, and so on, it would have been maybe months of projects at least, if not more,” Leon said. “So it would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars—to invest in creating and maintaining that—that we don’t have to spend.”

Decathlon didn’t have to spend significant time or money preparing its product data for each channel, either. Feedonomics’ ability to create distinct catalogs from a single dataset simplified the listing and optimization processes for Leon and his team.

“I think it’s the most beautiful feature of Feedonomics, being able to map and transform our content,” Leon said. “Because very rapidly we have realized that each channel, marketing or marketplace, has its own taxonomy, its own data schema, and so on. So we had to map our own taxonomy with Google taxonomy, with Walmart taxonomy, with Target taxonomy, for example. Things start to get complicated because they have all their own requirements.”

More control and greater peace of mind

To keep Decathlon’s product data accurate and optimized on multiple channels, the Feedonomics team automatically categorizes new products, regularly checks for missing product attributes or invalid values, and actively tracks and resolves feed-based errors. The in-platform access allows Leon and his team to view these error dashboards and other feed-related details in a single workspace, rather than having to switch between multiple seller portals.

“The troubleshooting part, it’s much easier now than ever before,” Leon said. “And it’s very, very simple, even for a non-expert of the marketplaces or the platform.”

Leon said the visibility and flexibility of Feedonomics’ platform also offers Decathlon a high degree of control over data syndication.

“You can add any kind of data, basically,” Leon said. “So we have been able to push product content, but we are also able to push sales data, or any other kind of data that we need. Even timestamps, for example, to trigger other automations behind that.”

The company uses rules within Feedonomics to allocate inventory across channels, as well as reserve stock when marketplace quantities get low to prevent overselling. This fast-paced multichannel strategy is sustainable because of the platform’s data safeguards, which trigger alerts or stop exports when issues are detected.

“If we are missing some fields, or if there is mandatory data missing for whatever reason, we can avoid that being sent to the [sales channel],” Leon said. “It doesn’t push and update if the conditions are not met. So that’s very good peace of mind, knowing that the system updates automatically, but at the same time has some by-design control that allows us to make sure that nothing goes off without anyone noticing or without knowing.”

Leon said he spends approximately one hour per week doing some maintenance within Feedonomics, and everything else is done automatically. Upgrading from a basic app within Shopify to a powerful feed integrator in Feedonomics has freed him up to focus on his other responsibilities.

“I’m sure that if we were not using Feedonomics today, I would need at least one more person to run that every day, to run the operation,” said Leon.

Reliability, service, partnership, and growth

Decathlon’s partnership with Feedonomics includes help from a dedicated feed manager, a specialist that provides consultation and implements many of the feed optimizations, data governance rules, and other platform logic that Decathlon uses to keep operations running smoothly.

“For me, one stronger thing that Feedonomics offers compared to others, is the [dedicated feed] manager,” Leon said. “It’s like an additional team member, basically—an expert of the platform working with my team, working with me, trying to best use the platform. And we have been in a close relationship for the past three years…

“The support to use the platform and to leverage the platform as much as possible is very, very important, and has been a great success. And it’s one of the reasons why we are using the platform so much today, because we have been well-helped to use it.”

Because everything in the digital world is essentially running 24/7, Leon said that the uninterrupted service from Feedonomics is a major part of why he expects the partnership to continue. Feedonomics supports multiple facets of the company’s ecommerce business, and the results have been stellar.

“Thanks to Feedonomics, we have been able to add two new revenue streams, mostly Walmart and Target, and those two represent around 5% of our total revenue, so it’s not a small amount,” Leon said. “We have all our marketing operations, all our martech is powered by Feedonomics today. So this is also huge.

“We have a marketing budget of a few million dollars per year, basically, and everything relies on that—like all our ads are powered by this catalog. So this is automated, thanks to Feedonomics.”