Dick's Sporting Goods, The Sports Authority and several other retailers are partnering with ShopRunner, owned by GSI Commerce, to offer a year of two-day
deliveries for $79, the same price charged through Amazon's Prime subscription program. The new service
also offers free returns, a perk not available to members of Prime.
hopRunner launched
Tuesday with a set of 15 retail partners, including Rockport, Bare
Necessities and the NFL shop already using the service. An additional
27, such as Borders, Barnes & Noble and Dick's Sporting Goods, signed up to launch soon.
“If
you're going to spend $79, you want a really broad assortment, and by
the end of the year, we'll have an assortment of five million items,”
Fiona Dias, executive vice president of strategy and marketing for GSI
Commerce Inc., the owner of Shop Runner, told The Seattle Times.
Amazon
is the largest e-tailer in the country with an 8% market
share, according to Hudson Square Research. That strength has led
retailers that normally wouldn't work together to do just that.
Retailers
in the new program are responsible for handling fulfillment in the new
program while ShopRunner tracks shipments and handles bookkeeping.
“There
are lots of pieces that you have to figure out,” Clay Cowan, vice
president of e-commerce at The Sports Authority, told the Journal. “That's one reason we view this as a pilot and will see how it goes.”
