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Success Story
JD Sports reaches 98% on-shelf availability with real-time RFID stock visibility
A Specialist retailer of trainers, sportswear, and apparel from brands like Nike, Adidas, and New Balance, JD Sports has grown over 45 years into nearly 5,000 stores across 46 countries.
Zebra Success Story: JD Sports
Overview: Retail Challenge
JD Sports wanted to replace an estimate-based, best-guess view of store inventory with accurate, real-time stock visibility across a large and fast-growing store estate, allowing the company to fulfil orders with confidence and meet rising customer expectations for fast, same-day delivery.
Benefits / Outcomes
- 98% on-shelf availability
- 20% faster replenishment
- 95% more items moved per colleague
- 4–8% higher completion rates on orders only a specific store can fulfil
- Store counts cut from 10 people over 8 hours to ~25 minutes for one colleague—enabling twice-weekly counts
- 414 stores live across the UK and ROI in roughly three months
About JD Sports
The purchase of a pair of trainers is rarely casual. The shopper wants a specific pair, in an exact size, at the moment they are making an order or buying in-store. For retailers competing on speed and choice, meeting that expectation isn't a differentiator anymore—it's the baseline. So how do you deliver it to every customer in every store? That's the challenge JD Sports set out to solve.
A Specialist retailer of trainers, sportswear, and apparel from brands like Nike, Adidas, and New Balance, JD Sports has grown over 45 years into nearly 5,000 stores across 46 countries. As it scaled, the retailer saw an opportunity to modernise its operations and create a more consistent experience for customers, regardless of where or how they shop. For JD Sports, that meant building a stronger foundation for the future: one that could support real-time inventory visibility, omnichannel retail, and the growing expectations of modern consumers.
This led JD Sports to radio frequency identification (RFID) and to Zebra Technologies. "We're very good at making a store look and feel like a JD anywhere in the world," says Daniel McGrath, Head of Customer Operations at JD Sports. "Now we want to offer our customers the same shopping experience across our whole footprint."
The Challenge
Having stock on hand is one of the key aspects of ensuring happy customers. But for years, JD Sports struggled to know exactly how much stock was in its stores. "Inventory was always an approximate model, allowing us an educated guess at most," explains McGrath. Head office set a target stock level for each store, the supply chain shipped against it, and the system kept count by tracking events along the way: items picked, received, sold, and refunded. The result was a gap between the system and the shelf. A single missed step could create a discrepancy, leaving the recorded stock out of step with what was physically in the store. A product might appear available when it wasn't, so the store never reordered it, and sometimes sold it online to a customer it could not supply. In larger, fast-moving stores, the risk only grew, and finding stock to fulfil an order could take too long.
The company would cover those gaps by rerouting orders or pushing for faster delivery, an approach that JD Sports saw as unsustainable for a more on-demand future. "To be able to offer services like one-hour click-and-collect, or 30-minute delivery, our stock count needs to be accurate," says McGrath. "Uncertainty becomes the main obstacle standing between us and the experience we want to offer."
The answer came down to one thing: knowing exactly what every store held, in real time. That set a clear bar for the solution: it had to be accurate and live, simple enough that every associate would actually use it, and fast to roll out across the whole estate to a single standard. Just as importantly, it needed to create a foundation for the omnichannel services and customer experiences JD Sports plans to expand in the years ahead.
What Zebra gives us is the ability to scale with trust. Things just land and work. Colleagues open a box, turn it on, and they're up and running—and that lets our teams spend their time where it matters: with the customer.
The Solution
Getting there meant putting that capability directly in associates' hands rather than wiring up fixed infrastructure store by store. Using handheld readers could deliver a real-time count, and they could roll out across the whole footprint to the same standard. When choosing the right hardware, JD Sports ran identical software on Zebra devices and two other vendors across five pilot stores, and Zebra’s devices read tags faster and at greater range. The company also found Zebra devices robust for daily use, and most importantly, easy for staff members to just pick up and start using. Stores now use Zebra TC2 Series Mobile Computers paired with RFD40 RFID sleds, allowing staff the flexibility and effectiveness they need on the shop floor.
An associate clips the sled onto the mobile computer and walks the floor and stockroom, sweeping rails and shelves as the reader logs every tagged item in range and builds a live count on screen. One colleague can cover a whole store in a single pass. Stores can run this process from twice a week to daily, allowing them to keep shelves and the system in sync. This means that when a customer walks in, what's available is really available; and if they ask for a size that isn't on the floor, staff find it on the mobile computer in seconds.
Speed mattered in the rollout too. JD Sports went from sign-off to its first live store in just 76 working days, overhauling hardware, software, supply chain, and training in one push. The retailer then expanded at an average of 26 stores a week, reaching 414 locations across the UK and Ireland in roughly three months. That pace depended on close coordination between partners, with Renovotec sourcing, configuring and delivering devices in line with the rollout schedule, while Checkpoint's ItemOptix™ software provided a single view of inventory data across the estate.
JD Sports also built support into the programme from day one. Zebra OneCare™ goes beyond a standard warranty, covering everyday wear and tear as well as accidental damage. "Stores used to fear that a broken device meant an unexpected bill they couldn't cover," notes McGrath. "Now, they have assurance that it's covered. If something breaks, they raise a ticket and we swap it out at no cost to them, and that's changed how confidently they run their stores."
The Zebra Difference: Outcome and Benefits
Faster stock counts are valuable in themselves, but the real advantage is consistency. JD Sports used to run a physical audit every 90 days that tied up 10 people for a full eight hours. "Now we do a stock-count of an average store in 25 minutes, and our biggest store of 60,000 square feet at the Trafford Centre, in an hour," shares McGrath. "We can effectively count twice a week for an hour of someone's time." A quarterly snapshot has become a near-constant read on what each store actually holds, so the stock customers are counting on stays accurate between visits, not just on audit day.
That accuracy translates directly into a better customer experience, helping ensure products are available when shoppers expect them. On-shelf availability now sits at 98%, so if a size is in the building, it's almost always out on the floor where a customer can find it. Replenishment runs 20% faster, keeping fast-selling sizes from sitting in the stockroom while someone leaves empty-handed. Compared with the old pen-and-paper process, colleagues can now move 95% more items while spending less time on stock counting. And on orders only one store can fulfil, completion rates have climbed 4% to 8%: orders that once quietly fell through now reach the customer who placed them and protect revenue that used to slip away.
The same visibility is also helping JD Sports tackle loss more proactively. Instead of waiting for a quarterly audit to reveal discrepancies, teams can identify and investigate issues much sooner. "We can see where loss is happening before it shows up in a 90- or 180-day audit, instead of piecing together the theory afterwards," says McGrath.
For all the technology involved, McGrath credits the people most. "All of this would have been impossible without our store teams embracing the change," he says. "Because the technology just worked, people could see the benefit straight away and just learnt to work better with it."
The rollout is the beginning, not the end. While the immediate benefits are clear, the programme has also created new possibilities for JD Sports. The retailer is already exploring RFID-enabled self-checkouts, smart fitting rooms that introduce data and security where loss tends to go undetected, and overhead readers capable of converting unknown loss into known loss. The same inventory visibility could also support a broader range of customer experiences, from phone-based in-store journeys to giving AI shopping assistants confidence that a product is actually on the shelf.
For JD Sports, Zebra has become less a supplier than part of how the business now runs its stores. Asked to sum up that value, McGrath doesn't hesitate. "What Zebra gives us is the ability to scale with trust," he says. "Things just land and work. Colleagues open a box, turn it on, and they're up and running, and that lets our teams spend their time where it matters: with the customer."
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