Archive for December, 2008
My Site-To-Store Delivery Experience
I had the pleasure of ordering online with the masses on Thanksgiving Day, and wanted to share my experience with you. I was on the lookout for an Xbox 360 and had been checking out all the Black Friday sales ads, online and in print, hoping that someone would have a great deal. As usual, [...]
Achieving a Single Version of the Truth
How many times does this happen in your company? You go to a meeting about sales performance, and Marketing says they think sales are up 3.5%, but the merchants disagree and say sales are up 6.3%. The specific numbers in this example aren’t important; the point is that the two figures aren’t even close. [...]
Did Cyber Monday Live Up to Its Billing?
Online spending on the Monday after Thanksgiving reached $846 million, up 15 percent from a year earlier, but e-commerce spending for the holiday season to date is off 2 percent as consumers wait for deals, according to tracking firm comScore Inc. But I’m not sure that this “made up shopping holiday” was everything that the [...]
Sales Without Inventory
Sales without inventory—now there’s an oxymoron. Many of us who cut our teeth in the retail and catalog trade know that you have to own inventory to make sales. In fact, for many businesses it’s the largest balance sheet asset.
In the late 1990s, dot.com companies with their “virtual inventory” concept tried to change all that. [...]
The “News” Is Good – But At What Cost?
Early reports from Black Friday and the remainder of the post-Thanksgiving weekend seemed positive enough: “The holiday shopping season got off to a better-than-expected start” said The Wall Street Journal; “Consumers swarmed the nation’s stores over the weekend… giving retailers a little Christmas cheer” said the Washington Post. But beneath that cheery exterior are some [...]
The Skinny On Slim Jims
An update from ACMA (American Catalog Mailers Association) suggests that catalogers may want to start preparing for imminent changes to USPS rates for slim jims. ACMA says their best guess is that many of the changes to slim jim regulations suggested by a Federal Register notice in March 2008 will become official, with final rules [...]
