Integrating 3rd Party Web Services: Golf Masters' Strategy for Competing against a Retail Giant

Julian J. Ray, Amy W. Ray
2004 Americas Conference on Information Systems  
Golf Masters is a golf retail and service company with annual revenues approximating $1 million. Most of the items they sell are commodity products that generally sell at or near manufacturer controlled prices. Recently Golfers Club Warehouse, a large chain store, opened a 24,000 sq ft retail facility within ½ a mile of the store threatening their viability. In response, Golf Masters adopted an aggressive three-pronged management strategy aimed at better managing customer relationships,
more » ... ng short-term and long-term revenues, and enabling information sharing with business partners. To implement these management strategies, Golf Masters sought external expertise on technology solutions for SMEs and ultimately decided to employ readily available third-party web services to reengineer many internal business processes and improve capacity utilization of under-employed services. This paper discusses Golf Masters' innovative and integrative use of third-party web-services, including online data mining tools, online auctions and automated bidding systems. In particular, we describe how the company developed an efficient means for acquiring a stream of lower-cost product, thereby enabling them to remain price-competitive while simultaneously increasing profit margins. As a result of the processes described here, Golf Masters has not only survived, but in 2003, last quarter earnings increased 30% over average previous years performance. This paper concludes by identifying several areas of continuing and future research.
dblp:conf/amcis/RayR04 fatcat:2cxdjq4e55djvjk2p77u6eypum