How Decathlon UK partnered with PricingHUB to build a more agile, customer-centric pricing strategy, using data-driven experimentation to optimize pricing decisions and scale successful approaches across markets.
“We wanted to enhance our expertise in pricing and had a significant need to measure our customers' price sensitivity.”
Decathlon is one of the world’s largest sports retailers, offering sporting goods, equipment, and apparel across a network spanning 70 countries. In the UK, the company operates 50 stores and offers an extensive assortment of approximately 132,000 SKUs across both national brands and private-label products.
With a large product assortment, nationwide retail footprint, and commitment to accessible pricing, the company continually looks for ways to deliver value to customers while supporting sustainable, profitable growth.
“With our business being quite seasonal and with tight timings on implementations, our approach has been iterative. We have used the learnings obtained from a summer campaign to improve the process and validate hypotheses for the winter campaign. This entire process allows us to enhance things gradually. The ultimate goal is to find the right price for our customers and to be much more detailed about what has been achieved in the past.”
Pricing has become increasingly complex for retailers. For Decathlon UK, external forces including inflation, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and changing consumer behavior created unprecedented uncertainty. Traditional approaches to pricing were becoming less effective in an environment where market conditions and customer expectations could change quickly.
At the same time, Decathlon wanted to deepen its internal pricing expertise and better understand customer price sensitivity. With 132,000 SKUs and a highly seasonal business, the company needed a way to test pricing hypotheses, understand their impact, and adapt its strategy without relying solely on assumptions or historical approaches.
Technology added another consideration. Decathlon had introduced electronic shelf labels in selected UK stores, creating the opportunity for faster, more seamless price changes, but also making it important that its pricing systems and processes worked effectively together.
Decathlon needed a pricing approach that combined reliable data, experimentation, customer price sensitivity, and internal expertise, while giving teams the agility to continuously test, learn, and improve.
"Data validation and cleansing lay the foundation for informed decision-making. In tandem, human transformation is essential, uniting all involved teams — product managers, category managers, finance, customer service, and beyond. Implementing a strategy of small victories fosters momentum, while agility ensures we refine our approach in real time, validating hypotheses and honing our strategy as we progress."
Decathlon partnered with PricingHUB to develop a more customer-centric approach to pricing optimisation. Together, the teams focused first on gathering the necessary data and establishing the technological foundation needed to support robust pricing models and faster experimentation.
A central part of the approach was the use of transversal split control groups. Selected stores were kept outside pricing changes, allowing Decathlon to compare their performance against stores where optimised prices were implemented under similar market conditions. Decathlon also brought its own data science methodology to the partnership, with its team regularly comparing results with PricingHUB’s Data Science team to validate alignment.
The transformation went beyond technology. PricingHUB provided Decathlon teams with a knowledge base, explanatory content, and online training workshops designed to help employees understand the methodology and build greater operational autonomy. Combined with Decathlon’s electronic shelf labels, this approach gave teams a foundation for testing pricing decisions, implementing changes efficiently, measuring their impact, and refining the strategy over time.
Rather than treating pricing transformation as a single implementation, Decathlon adopted an iterative test-and-learn model.
An initial summer campaign provided the company with an opportunity to validate its pricing optimisation approach and generate learnings that could be applied to future campaigns. The acceleration in performance observed during this test gave Decathlon confidence to continue experimenting during the winter season.
The subsequent winter campaign delivered further acceleration in performance, helping validate the effectiveness of Decathlon’s customer-centric pricing approach across different seasonal conditions.
The impact is now extending beyond individual campaigns. Building on the results and learnings generated in the UK, Decathlon is preparing to expand its testing into two additional countries, turning a series of pricing experiments into a more scalable approach for supporting growth, profitability, and customer value across markets.
Our Akeneo Experts are here to answer all the questions you might have about our products and help you to move forward on your PXM journey.
Summer Release
