Marketing, Merchandising, Inventory Control: Gaining a Single Version of the Truth
I was sitting in a client meeting for business intelligence (BI) and dashboard planning this past week, and the Merchandising, Marketing and Inventory Control people were squaring off over why Merchandising’s results never tie back to Marketing and Inventory Control. Some of it was argumentative, but when you step back and look at it objectively, [...]
Best Practices in Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment – Our New Book
Best Practices in Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment is now available. This guide to multichannel best practices was derived from our 24 years of experience with hundreds of catalog, eCommerce and retail companies.
Our team understands the issues and challenges facing multichannel businesses and provides insight on the following topics:
Business Management – including “Developing Your Corporate Dashboard [...]
Industry e-Newsletter from ACMA
Dear Members and Friends:
It has been a couple of months since our last industry general update. While the summer months are typically a slower time, this period has been anything but. The pace of change at the USPS continues to accelerate with numerous issues that affect cataloging moving one way then the other, [...]
Contemplating A Water Bottle
On vacation last week, I was sitting on the shoreline of Maine, kind of daydreaming and drinking a bottle of water. I noticed that the Poland Spring bottle seemed somehow different. It was thinner plastic, and had a few more ridges to hold on to it with. On the label I found:
Eco-Shape Bottle
Poland Spring
Our bottle [...]
National Wildlife Customer Alert
It has been seven weeks since BlueSky Brands shut down operations, stranding a number of catalog and e-commerce businesses. Now we’ve received an e-mail that the National Wildlife Federation sent to customers who have purchased items directly from the Federation.
Here’s what the e-mail said:
“There are still many opportunities to receive great wildlife and nature-themed merchandise [...]
Selecting and Implementing the Right System
During a session I led at last week’s National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Orlando, Fla., I identified several critical mistakes businesses make in their systems selection processes, regardless of the type of system. These include distributed control systems, order management systems (OMS), warehouse management systems (WMS), e-commerce or similar ones.
Among the mistakes I [...]
Peter Rice Pops Up Again!
Peter Rice! Yes, one of the real catalog and e-commerce entrepreneurs in the multichannel industry, Peter was the founder and CEO of Plow & Hearth and sold it to 1-800-Flowers companies. Peter is joined in new ventures by his son Pete and Tom Freshour, formerly vice presidents for Marketing and Customer Contact Center, respectively, of [...]
Economic Bright Spot: E-commerce
We all know that e-commerce has had big percentage growth for the past three years. In fact, e-commerce grew 20% overall last year, even though that’s largely a transfer of sales from catalog. Many of our clients now have more than 50% of their total direct sales coming through e-commerce.
E-commerce has just received another kudo. [...]
2007 Thanksgiving Weekend’s Sales Results
Retailers are reporting better than expected results for Black Friday, the day following Thanksgiving. Sales were up an unexpected 8.3% over last year to $10.1 billion for the day, according to ShopperTrak RCT Corp. However, the average customer expenditure was lower. For many retailers, Black Friday represents 5% of their total Christmas volume, and up [...]
Going for the Green in the Multichannel Industry
While Al Gore may have won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for bringing global warming into the spotlight, let’s not forget that many ordinary Americans work equally hard every day to lessen their impact on the environment, as do many multichannel companies, without hope of any such reward or acknowledgment.
Take, for instance, two of [...]
