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Forzani Group Ltd., the country's largest sporting goods retailer, will abandon its flagship SportChek.ca e-commerce site on Friday after finding that not enough customers shopped on-line to make it profitable.

Shoppers generally prefer to do research at the Web site but head to a store to make their purchases, said Robert Sartor, chief financial officer for Calgary-based Forzani.

He said it would have taken "several years if, in fact, at all" for SportChek.ca to make money.

"Consumers have been conditioned by people who came before us to only buy on-line when things are ridiculously low priced," Mr. Sartor said in a telephone interview. "We were not going to open a deep-discount Web site."

As well, consumers are uncomfortable buying apparel, shoes and equipment on-line because of different styles, sizes and adjustments needed, he said.

The Web site was launched only in June, 2001, delayed as Forzani went through a lot of soul-searching about how to run an on-line e-commerce business.

It initially had teamed up with a U.S.-based sports Web site partly owned by hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, but that fell through in late 2000.

Instead, it struck a deal with Blast Radius, a Vancouver-based Internet site producer that had designed sites for brands such as Nike, Nintendo and Lego.

Forzani, which operates outlets under the Sport Chek and Sports Mart banners among others, was counting on SportChek.ca to help the national retailer capture a bigger slice of the $6-billion-a-year sporting goods market.

"There is a certain category of products that won't do well on-line," said Duncan McKie, president of market researcher Pollara Inc. Those are products that need to be fitted and come in a variety of colours and shapes.

In those categories, "the prospects of doing well on-line are pretty dismal," Mr. McKie said.

He said sporting goods "aren't even on the radar screen" in rankings of on-line items that do business on the Internet.

Mr. Sartor said SportChek.ca will remain as a marketing and information tool, since most people who subscribed to the site weren't shoppers but looked to it for research.

He said the e-commerce shutdown will not result in many job losses because the company has already trimmed staff and others will be absorbed in the operation or continue to produce content for the site. However, Graham Duffy, who headed the interactive division, will leave this week.

Meanwhile, Forzani will continue to run the much smaller Sportmart.ca site, which was part of the retail chain that the company acquired about a year ago.

Mr. Sartor said Sportmart.ca is cheaper to operate because it carries much fewer items, and contains almost no content.

Forzani rejected the option of continuing SportChek.ca's e-commerce operation at least until the holiday season to cash in on those heightened sales. Running the site until the end of the year would have required a big investment that wouldn't have been worthwhile, he said.

"In the long term, we'll save money" by exiting e-commerce at the SportChek.ca site, he said.

Sport Mart carries only about 10 per cent of the goods that Sport Chek has, he said. "It's tough to try to offer 50,000 units on-line and do it very, very efficiently and effectively."

Jamie Spreng, an analyst at Canaccord Capital Corp. in Montreal, said he was surprised that Forzani is dismantling the e-commerce operation because the company hadn't hinted at problems.

But Mr. Spreng credited Forzani for the decision to keep the site going to pitch its products.

"The more technical the product, the more challenge there is buying it on-line."

Over all, Forzani has performed well, analysts said, although its stock price has lost some of its steam on the Toronto Stock Exchange since the summer.

Forzani is one of Canada's fastest-growing retail companies with 21 per cent average annualized growth in total sales over the past three years, Marilyn Brophy, an analyst with Scotia Capital, said in a report last week.

The report was issued after Mr. Sartor spoke at an investors' conference sponsored by Scotia Capital. Ms. Brophy said Forzani is one of the few retailers whose gross profit margins are gaining despite a tough retail environment.

Forzani Group shares closed at $17.85, down 25 cents, on the TSX yesterday.