How Sports Brands Can Easily Turn Gameday Hype into Unlimited Sales

It’s like a scene from a sports movie: the underdog team or player pulls off a stunning upset, coming from behind to win a championship. Within minutes, fans rush to the team site and load up their carts with commemorative merchandise.

But while fans celebrate, chaos brews behind the scenes. The warehouse is overwhelmed as a tidal wave of orders comes through, often without enough stock on-hand. Meanwhile, the customer service team scrambles to address concerns from fans who are anxiously awaiting their new gear.

For sports merchandisers, this isn’t a one-time problem—it’s the reality of working in an unpredictable industry. When your hottest-selling SKUs depend on championship outcomes, MVP announcements, or surprise victories, planning inventory in advance can be a guessing game.

That’s why so many sports brands turn to pre-orders. Pre-orders allow merchandisers to sell first and produce later—avoiding the risk of overstocking the wrong team or understocking the winner. But while pre-orders enable flexibility, they can also create huge operational headaches that are unique to these demand spikes, especially if they’re not managed correctly.

At Purple Dot, we’ve been in the trenches powering pre-orders for some of the world’s top athletes and professional sports collabs. We’ve learned a thing or two along the way about how to power a seamless pre-order experience within sports merchandise.

Preorders, but painless. 

Pre-orders should be as smooth as your in-stock operations. With sports brands, there are consistently two pain points that prevent this goal from happening: warehouse meltdowns and customer service issues. That’s why Purple Dot puts these workflows first— so that your brand can capitalize on every surge of fan fervor.

How Purple Dot eliminates warehouse chaos for smooth pre-order sales

One of the biggest pain points for sports merchandisers is split orders. 

Imagine this: a customer buys the new MVP World Series baseball cap that hasn’t arrived in the warehouse yet, and adds an in-stock jersey to their order, too. This order arrives at the warehouse only to cause confusion. Do they fulfill part of the order? Do they start packing half of the order and put it aside until the remaining inventory arrives? A backlog starts to build, and meanwhile, you have irate customers wondering whether their new merch is ever going to show up. 

The result is all too familiar for warehouse and back office staff used to working with warehouse management systems and clunky third-party logistic companies that aren’t designed with preorders in mind. 

Purple Dot eliminates these logistical nightmares by truly holding back pre-orders from the warehouse until stock arrives. Our philosophy is that fulfillment teams and systems should receive orders only when they’re ready to ship, with stock on-hand. Otherwise, it’s just noise that creates inefficiencies, headaches, and ultimately errors that impact customers. 

The outcome: no more unwieldy manual tracking and order updates, no more operational bottlenecks, and no more “where’s my order?” chaos.

Eliminating warehouse meltdowns delivered wins for a top race car driver

When a leading automobile racer’s team integrated Purple Dot with their sales platform, they were able to launch and sell high-demand products before production was complete. Previously, they could only sell what was physically in their warehouses, leading to dreaded under- and overstocking issues. With Purple Dot, they began selling exclusive merch immediately after each win, before production was even complete. 

It worked! The brand was able to maximize sales by continuously rolling over estimated ship dates into the future to reflect each upcoming production run, and controlling when to push orders down to the warehouse to maximize efficiency.

And this isn’t an isolated case. Across industries, we’ve found that brands that keep selling with pre-orders sell 50% more during demand spikes– and with Purple Dot, you don’t have to sacrifice operational efficiency to do so.

How Purple Dot delivers a reliable, trustworthy customer experience for sports fans 

A positive fan experience is essential for sports brands—especially when excitement is high and emotions run hot. Fans want to celebrate the moment, not stress about when their gear will arrive.

Let’s think about an example that will likely be familiar to sports brands (especially your CX teams). After the Stanley Cup, fans may rush to pre-order commemorative hockey pucks, jerseys, and limited-edition memorabilia—only for interest to wane in the off-season. Traditionally, this surge would overwhelm existing customer service teams with questions about delivery timelines and availability.

That’s why with Purple Dot, transparency is built into the end-to-end customer experience. From the moment a fan completes their order, they receive clear estimated shipping dates and timely updates as their order progresses through production. All brands have to do is set the estimated ship dates once in their Purple Dot portal, and we automatically update it across every customer touchpoint. 

To cut down customer service tickets even further, Purple Dot powers a self-serve portal for customers, where they can check order status or make changes before their order ships—all without needing to contact support. Check out this article for more top tips on how to provide stellar customer service with pre-orders.

All of this means sports merchandisers can scale quickly to meet key moments, building trust and strengthening fan loyalty, without CX teams carrying the burden.

The bottom line: Pre-orders can just work.

Sports merchandisers shouldn’t have to choose between operational mayhem and sales growth. With Purple Dot, you can have preorders done right.

We handle the heavy-lifting while putting your workflows first, leading to less warehouse chaos and greater customer satisfaction, so that you can focus on creating great products for your devoted fans and celebrating big wins. 

Ready to make pre-orders work for you, not against you? Book a demo with Purple Dot today!

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