Are You Taking Too Many Orders Online?

I was involved in a discussion recently where the CFO of a catalog company was pleased that his company now took 80 percent of all orders online. He talked about how much money his company was saving, as processing online orders cost about a third of phone orders. I then politely asked him how overall sales were. He said bad and blamed it on the recession.
I then asked this catalog CFO if he saw a difference between online and phone orders. Was the average order value the same? Were lines per order and units per order similar? He said online buyers were "price shoppers" and naturally spent less, about 30 percent less.