The nation’s favourite sports nowadays seem to be the ones we see mostly being televised. Football sees the lion’s share of viewers and participants, with rugby being the second most watched and played sport in the country. In kind many of the retailers choose to stock items relevant to these sports, offering low cost, low quality equipment for all ages. While this is enough to appeal to the majority of our sporting community, it ignores many sports in favour of those two. Sure, you can buy running clothes and shoes at these sorts of sport retailers but if you were to undertake in a much more niche sport such as badminton, you may find your sporting needs not catered to.

This leaves it up to lesser known retailers to try to fill the gap, but due to their niche appeal we may find it difficult to even find such shops on the high street. Even if we do find them, because of the competitive nature of the industry and because of their disadvantaged financial position relative to other sports retailers, the prices can sometimes be huge, almost unfair in some cases. Because of this more and more people tend to find themselves turning towards the world of online retailing to get their products, and it’s easy to see why.

Firstly, there is no travel required on behalf of us as customers as most of these retailers deliver to your door personally, or send it out via mail, depending on the size of the order. It also costs less for us to buy our products than the high street shops and you can find everything you might need for your sport in the same place. Because its often all on the same website it can be a massive time saver if you need to order products for more than one sport, which is much better than having to scout out many specialist shops in the high street. When you consider how much time, money and effort you save from ordering from home it seems you can’t afford not to do it, which would lead to an increasing dwindling in the amount of major sports stores who only seem to cater for the more popular sports, giving other businesses in the industry a chance to grow.