it is one thing to tell teh club to purchase loads of merchandising but we live hand to mouth.

Look at the games, Bradford, Leeds, Wigan fans all buy shirts in huge numbers as well as season tickets. We traditionally aren't great at buying in to the club image.

How many people on here regularily buy club branded stuff?

Maybe if the club was given a list of orders for items they might be more willing to splash the cash.

Ask Rob how hard was it to sell T shirts for Forever Reds.

I think the hats Shirl and Alan did were the easiest to shift. And the club then lifted the design

If Wigan make more money on coasters than we do on replica shirts, I wouldn't be a fat lot surprised but let's not pretend it's because of the shop layout.


The online shop is bobbins and I agree with others - a holding page would be a classier solution to what's there.
I'd imagine the limited quantity of shirts is an insight into how precious every penny is at the club at the moment. Without knowing what a fresh batch costs, we've no idea if re-stocking is a good idea or not.


Aggressive, cost-heavy, loss-making marketing. We've got so much to learn.

Really heavy, I heard.

I think some people are missing the point. The shop currently appears to have a range of shirts, t-shirts, polo shirts, etc in adult sizes. All well and good.

But I'm talking about selling cheap alternatives to a £20plus item of clothing. I appreciate the club may not have loads of money to splash about, but how expensive would, say, an order for 1000 items to retail at less than £5 cost the club? Common sense says it costs less than £5k! It is a business they are trying to run here. You have to speculate to accumulate. Simple. If it doesn't work then fine - but they've never tried it!!

(And they have obviously found the money to fill the shop out with more expensive clothing items, so money has been spent somewhere along the line...)

Just for info my wife took the shirt back which we paid £33 for! We told the assistant we were prepared to wait for a new batch or asked could it be ordered, they already had my money, guess what they told my wife the season was halfway through & they would not be ordering any more. Very sad how do we expect to market our product to families when we cannot even have the basics in the shop.

I have also received a full refund, wasted!

Be fair though, the club will only order what it thinks it can sell in the space of this season. It's damned what ever it does in this case as the product has a short life span. Order too few and people complain when they are sold out, order too many and people complain the club has no money because they've just written off stock they can't sell.

Maybe the answer is to launch next seasons shirt mid way through this season, invite pre-orders from fans then buy to order, with a small percentage on top. make a big event of it at christmas and have some of the players hand deliver the shirts.

The focus of the club shop should primarily be on timeless, classic items that won't date after a season. Simple polo shirts and t-shirts with the classic devil on and such like. The reality is we don't sell a lot of merchandise and wouldn't even if we had a well stocked shop.

Arrrggh. I am sorry to keep going on about this (as I know there are undoubtedly more important things to focus on) but why are people under the illusion that all we should sell in the shop is clothing, especially as much of it has a limited shelf life?

i don't think anyone is, but they are the items that people predominately purchase. The rest are items, which as mentioned on here, people tend to pick up as an additional item or when giving their kids a couple of quid at each game. the club has to ensure that any item it invests in can be sold and make a decent return. Given the tight budget, the club is right to limit its range, focus on items with the greatest profit margin and suppliment these with a limited but varied range of items which fit lower price brackets

when money is tight the club are not going to buy stock they cant guarantee they wont sell, been a huge own goal with the away shirts needed more or a balance when it comes to picking sizes to sell, there is some good stuff in the shop but its a bit expensive but the club need to make sure they dont lose on items so i guess it has a high mark up price

The online shop needs fixing badly, we do some good stuff online with the social media but website and online shop is reaily bad at times, cant understand what the big problem is unless we have subcontraced the running of it out (to keep our costs down) and the company isnt up to it.

Hopefully the club will realise that merchandise is a big money maker if you get the right stuff in at the right price and it might fullfill the demands us fans require when it comes to official merchandise