Since its inception in 1985, Venus Swimwear has had a long history of growth, with annual sales increases averaging 15 percent to 25 percent. Today, the Jacksonville, FL-based company that was started by a college student and weightlifting enthusiast is the worldโs largest marketer of junior swimwear. But as Venus grew, founder Daryle Scott realized he had one problem. โWe had this business that was doing really well, but itโs basically a February-through-June operation and is dead in the winter.โ Venus Swimwear has always handled its own order-taking and fulfillment, and the seasonality was putting a dent in the companyโs back-end productivity. Scottโs solution:
Order Fulfillment
Long after the Internet bubble burst, e-commerce is alive and well for direct marketers and is the fastest-growing direct commerce sales channel. Catalog companies have three options for managing the dynamic online marketing environment. An Independent Adjunct At one extreme, a catalogโs e-commerce operation can stand alone as a totally independent adjunct to the traditional enterprise. Although it may share some of the same merchandise, it also may feature items that are not in the catalog. When it does offer catalog items, they may be only a subset of the full catalog line. In this extreme scenario, no effort is needed to
When Glen Pirie came to Swanson Health Products four years ago with a background in retail operations he was used to serving big customers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot. But he soon realized that for a consumer catalog, โA lot of the same business principles applyโlike giving customers what they want.โ The difference in the catalog field, he says is that there are โa lot more customers when youโre dealing with catalog orders. At Swanson, we have about 750,000.โ Today, Pirie overseas purchasing, receiving, manufacturing and logistics at Swanson, which markets about 6,000 vitamin and health supplement products, including national and proprietary
Flip to the order form of any catalog or go to the checkout of a catalogerโs Web site, and youโll find one truth: Thereโs no standard for shipping and handling (S&H) fees. What a catalog charges to ship product depends on many factors, such as type of product (soft goods or hard goods) or the shipping method chosen by the customer. Others are less-than-obvious and depend on how the cataloger chooses to account for S&H in its operations. These variables make S&H a widely debated topic. According to F. Curtis Barry & Co., an operations consulting firm, about half of catalogers charge
On the surface, itโs a typical American success story: an immigrant family fleeing religious persecution arrives in the United States and starts a business; 85 years later itโs not only successful, but still family-owned and operated. Today Omaha Steaks is a meat dynasty, making the merchandising and fulfillment challenges it faced from the beginning uniquely significant. How it continues to survive those challenges highlights strategies for other catalogers hoping to conquer the perishables market. On-site Processing Omaha Steaks enjoys the advantage of processing most of its own product offerings. The company sources itsโliterallyโraw material mainly from Midwestern producers, and then ages, trims and
Richard Eaton, vice president, fulfillment services of Highlights for Children, and Tom Kirkham, senior consultant for ESYNC International, spoke to Catalog Success a few weeks before Highlights planned to go live with a new warehouse management system (WMS). Like many catalogers, Highlights for Childrenโs product-fulfillment operation contends with several distribution channels and myriad product types. Highlightsโ in-house distribution center handles fulfillment for three divisions: - Highlights Catalog, a traditional childrenโs products catalog; - Highlights Jigsaw, an educational toy and book supplier offering products through home parties similar to the Tupperware model; and - a third division that sells business-to-business (b-to-b)
In a tightening economy, back-end fulfillment costs such as chargebacksโdispute mechanisms credit card customers use to reverse transactionsโcomprise a line item worth scrutinizing. Depending on the volume of chargebacks a cataloger is hit with in a set time period, fees (which are levied on a merchant) can run from $20 up to a whopping $150 per chargeback. โTo say the least, chargebacks can get very expensive for merchants,โ says Scott Martin, chief operating officer of EPX, a New Castle, DE-based electronic payment processor. Hereโs how catalogers can reduce chargebacks generated from either customer disputes or outright fraud. Tips to Reduce Customer Disputes
If youโve ever struggled with how to effectively manage relationships with your vendors, following are some tips learned from the trenches of cataloging. Complaints About the Call Center The second hand on my watch swept past 12 ... again. Iโd been on hold for 10 long minutes. Another music-on-hold tune began, and I realized Iโd heard it already. Iโd been on hold so long, the tape loop was repeating! As I listened, I imagined all the customers who had viewed my beautiful catalog, read my great copy, found a product they really loved, calledโand now were hanging up in disgust at the
Whether theyโre looking for 14-karat gold rings or 14-bit drill sets, consumers are flocking in record numbers to the Internet to buy products. The question is, can Web retailers handle the increasingly heavy traffic effectively? Last year, cyber-shopping went from marginal to mainstream, as 73 percent of consumers bought products online, according to a survey by AT&T. And by next year, global Web sales are expected to reach $51.6 billion, according to a survey by Jupiter Media Metrix, a research firm. As technology improves and consumers become more comfortable buying online, the number of Internet shoppers likely will increase, too. In fact,
As with holiday gift shopping, the best way to ensure a happy holiday season for your catalog operation is to do as much as you can ahead of timeโfrom planning and production to picking, packing ... and even loading the trucks. For Hershey Direct, the catalog arm of Hersheyโs Chocolate World, a division of Hershey Foods, the Christmas holiday is by far its busiest season, drawing a whopping 85 percent of the divisionโs sales activity. (The second and third busiest seasons are the spring catalog, which mails in time for Motherโs Day, followed by the Valentineโs Day catalog.) Ramping up for the big rush