SoccerFanatic.com Review

As part of our new Dual Review Program, Soccer Reviews have teamed up with a number of online retailers to not only bring you the best reviews on football equipment but also reviews on different retailers and their services. Today we’ll be reviewing www.SoccerFanatic.com, the online wing of Lococo Sports, a retailer that has four Southern California locations. Lococo and Soccer Fanatic boast a “ultra user friendly website that is sure to improve your overall shopping experience” we went and put this statement to the test. This is the SoccerFanatic.com review. 

Soccer Fanatic’s homepage is simple and easy to navigate, everything you want can be found on the homepage. We especially liked the club and country bar on the bottom, enabling anyone to easily navigate to the merchandise of their favourite team. Soccer Fanatic boasts boots from all the ‘major’ brands such as Adidas, Nike, Umbro and Puma, but you won’t find any boots from smaller companies such as Lotto, Pantofolo D’oro and Pele Sports. They also have huge amounts of apparel, goalkeeping gear and other accessories. We highly suggest you go and take a look around for yourself!

One of the most intriguing and interesting features of Soccer Fanatic is their live customer service chat. Although while writing this review a CS rep wasn’t online, I tried out the live chat feature a couple of weeks ago.  If someone is available to talk to then you are greeted by an MSN chat window where you can interact with your customer service rep. While it was a cool feature, and did indeed help me, I was a bit peeved that the customer service rep left the chat before I had the opportunity to finish asking him my questions.

For the purposes of this review we decided that we wanted to buy some Dider Drogba related merchandise, so from the homescreen we clicked through to Didier Drogba’s page on Soccer Fanatic. We were greeted by a nifty little section dedicated to everything Dider Drogba.

Drogba gear not only features Chelsea merchandise, but also Ivory Coast stuff and not to mention his boots of choice, the Superfly IIIs (which are going for 35% off). ’

Clicking through to the page of these Superflys leads you to a fairly standard boot page where you can view images of the boot as well as pick your size and if you are sold, buy the boot. We decided to go ahead and ‘buy’ a pair of Superflys and so clicked ‘add to cart’. We then went ahead and checked out, after selecting to checkout as a guest, rather than making an account, we were asked to provide our billing information. A fairly standard process that included entering our address, name, phone number etc. You could then select to either pick it up at one of Lococo Sports retail stores in California or have it shipped to you. If you select to have it shipped to you, you’re prompted on what type of UPS shipping you would like.

Soccer Fanatic offer free ground shipping on any order over $75 and so that’s what we selected. After entering in our credit card information (MasterCard and Visa are accepted) and confirming the order, the process was complete. We then received  a confirmation email detailing our purchase, and then another email the next day with shipping and tracking information.

From the shipping and tracking email, you can click on through to a nifty UPS page where you’ll be able to track the progress of your order (in the near future, you’ll be able to track your order directly on the Soccer Fanatic site). In our case, we received the order email on the 5th, and the package arrived on the 6th, much sooner than we anticipated.

In conclusion, our experiences with Soccer Fanatic were on the whole positive. Despite the minor annoyance of being cyber ditched by their customer service rep, we were really pleased with how quickly and easy it was to place an order on the site. Something that not many sites do, which is stick to their timeframe of next day delivery, is something that Soccer Fanatic does and we commend them on that.

Cons: 

Questionable online customer service.

Only ship to the US.

Not too many  ’small’  brands.

Pros:

Quick delivery.

Simple and easy ordering process.

Not only football boots, but also merchandise, goalkeeping equipment and other apparel.

$10 off on first purchase! (See below!)

We’ve teamed up with the guys at Soccer Fanatic to offer Soccer Reviews readers the chance to get $10 off their first order of $50 or more, just use the code SR1050 at checkout and the $10 will de deducted! 

Please let us know in the comments section what you’d like to see in the retailer reviews we do in the future, it’d really help us out!