Dick’s Sporting Goods embraces holistic approach to payments

Prior to the pandemic, Dick’s Sporting Goods payments strategy was scattered across different teams and channels. However, after a major effort to modernize its e-commerce platform, the company started thinking more holistically about how its customers bought and paid for its products, according to Chelsea Leenhouts, director of product management and design at Dick’s Sporting Goods.

“It became an inflection point in our journey to really take a capability like payments and centralize it technically and operationally and organizationally, so that we can really serve the cross-channel ecosystem,” Leenhouts said during a panel discussion on Thursday at the Endless Aisle Live conference in New York City.

This central team now works closely with different teams across channels, marketing, and loyalty departments, with the goal of bringing new capabilities to market faster.

This centralized approach also created cost-saving opportunities, she said, noting how it helped Dick’s identify gaps between estimated and actual taxes in e-commerce payments, which was losing the company millions of dollars.

She also highlighted recent payment innovations such as on-demand financing through buy now, pay later apps, and said it’s important for retailers to understand “how different consumer segments think about that” so they can position these options at the beginning of the customer’s journey, as well as checkout.

Leenhouts said the philosophy behind this change is to “take payments from being transactional to being part of that discussion. It should be embedded in your conversations.”