Citing an opportunity for increased revenue in the wake of a successful football season, the University’s Department of Intercollegiate Athletics has ended its official arrangement to promote the Duck Store as its preferred online retailer.
As of Dec. 4, the day of the Oregon Civil War football game, links at the official University athletic department website, goducks.com, sent Internet users to a new site at shopgoducks.com.
Before Dec. 4, these same links sent users to the Duck Store site at uoduckstore.com. The Duck Store will still sell Duck athletic merchandise in all of its retail outlets as well as its website, but will do so without being directly linked to the athletic department’s own website.
The athletic department signed a contract with the Jacksonville, Fla.-based TeamFanShop Ltd. to operate shopgoducks.com.
Signed on Dec. 1, the new contract gives TeamFanShop the right to operate the only official online athletic merchandising site for the University.
TeamFanShop holds numerous contracts with other universities and athletic organizations to perform online marketing operations for various athletic-branded products.
Before becoming the official online Duck athletics merchandising vendor, it was already the official online retailer for the Pacific-10 Conference, as well as the Southeastern and Big Ten conferences. It is also the current online retailer for the Auburn Tigers athletic program, the Ducks’ opponent in the upcoming BCS National Championship Game.
The TeamFanShop contract will last for the next five years and guarantees the University at least $700,000 in revenue return over that period, said Assistant Athletic Director Joe Giansante.
Giansante also said the decision to switch official online merchandising retailers was driven by an opportunity to reap greater financial returns from Oregon Ducks merchandising during the Duck football team’s unprecedented season.
“We’re constantly looking for new ways to generate revenue to support the athletic department,” Giansante said. “We’ve been doing research on this for at least a year on percentages and gross revenues and what our peers are doing … the urgency really came about when we knew what our football team was doing. The amount of dollars that are available in merchandising and in licensing when you’re 12-0 in football are immense.”
Giansante was unable to provide specific figures regarding past revenue streams from the athletic department’s arrangement with the Duck Store, but said that the increased sales revenue received from the new contract would bolster the athletic department’s financial self-sufficiency and its ability to promote the team to potential fans outside of the immediate market.
Matt Dyste, director of the University’s Marketing and Brand Management Office, said in a written statement that the move was in full compliance with the University’s branding and promotion priorities and that all vendors involved were legal and fully certified.
“Hopefully the result will be increased online sales and provide another opportunity for fans and friends across the world to support the Ducks through the purchase of officially licensed products,” Dyste said.
Duck Store General Manager Jim Williams said that he had no sore feelings toward the athletic department and did not feel that the potential loss of Internet traffic would seriously alter his business practices.
“We really felt that they made a business decision and they have a right to make that business decision,” Williams said.
Williams declined to discuss The Duck Store’s exact revenue based off of online Duck Athletics sales but did say that Internet sale makes up only a fraction of the Duck Store’s business, slightly less than four percent.  
Of that percentage, not all of those sales come directly from traffic passed from goducks.com, so the actual revenue from specific athletics revenue was even less, Williams said.
The previous Duck Store-athletic department arrangement had no actual contract, but was merely an informal agreement to direct web traffic to The Duck Store.
The Duck Store retained 75 percent of sales revenue of athletic merchandise based on this agreement and split the other 25 percent between the athletic department and the athletic department’s own separate website provider.
“We’re partners with the University of Oregon athletic department; we’ve worked with them for many years,” Williams said. “We feel they made their own decision to take their online business elsewhere. From my point of view, it’s not a controversy. They made a decision that they must of felt was a good decision for them.”
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