F. Curtis Barry & Company’s Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment Blog

The Internet is new enough—hard to believe, isn’t it—that it’s still treated as a special case in terms of commerce. Case in point: State governments are currently prohibited from taxing Internet access, but that ban is set to expire Nov. 1 this year. Politicians and lobbyists are now debating whether to extend the current moratorium, […]

As Reported by Mokrynskidirect
The survey results for March report strengthening across the board for mailers vs. last year, but decreased sales performance for mailers vs. plan.
83% of all mailers surveyed reported March sales equal to or better than last year, and 54% reported sales equal to or better than plan for the month. 38% of […]

I want to say as a DMA member, speaker at many DMA conferences and a member of the Multichannel Council OPCOM committee, I am disappointed in the quality of the lobbying on the postal rate issues. One DMA executive said to me recently, “The DMA and its lobbyist were caught by surprise by the Rate […]

Absolute productivity has declined in many companies.
Indeed, in conducting our benchmarking surveys (which we’ve done since 1996), we’ve discovered that many metrics, such as orders processed per full-time warehouse worker, remained flat, while dollars of sales processed per warehouse square foot have declined. In turn, labor rates have increased from an average of $5.50 to […]

Focused discussion groups and roundtables can make you aware of innovative ideas, provide feedback from your peers about issues or concepts you might want to explore, and spark your own thought processes. Curt Barry hosted a Shipping and Handling Roundtable at this year’s National Conference on Operations and Fulfillment, and here are a few of […]

Multichannel Merchant did a good job of reporting on one of Tocky Lawrence’s NCOF presentations last week (“Developing and Applying Multichannel Contact Center Benchmarks”). The presentation concentrated on defining and describing actual metrics with some real numbers that the audience could use to gauge their call center operations: call abandon rates, service level, handle time, […]

ACMA. If you Google the acronym this week, you’ll find sites from Italy and Australia, organizations related to composites, case management, Chinese medical associations . . . but if you’re a cataloger, keep an eye open in the next couple of weeks for the brand-new American Catalog Mailers Association, which filed a statement of intent […]

Another quick update in this ongoing saga: If you haven’t already done so, you can still add your voice to those asking the Postal Regulatory Commission to reconsider its decision on new Standard Flat Mail rates. The deadline for public comment has been extended to Friday, May 4. The Direct Marketing Association recommends that concerned […]

It’s beginning to sound like a James Bond movie: “. . . hackers pointed a telescope-shaped antenna toward the store and used a laptop computer to decode data streaming through the air between hand-held price-checking devices, cash registers and the store’s computers.” This TJX security breach story just won’t go away—now The Wall Street Journal […]

The recent TJX security breach affecting 46.5 million customers (see our earlier post on the TJX Secuirty breach) has helped make it clear just how fragile retail security can be. RIS News quotes Greg Buzek, president of IHL Consulting, as saying that “most retailers’ IT systems are integrated today, it is very difficult to lock […]