Retail Pro, Page-Digital File for Bankruptcy Update
It has been brought to my attention that there are a few inaccuracies in our original blog on this subject that I would like to amend/correct as follows:
Retail Pro product sales have not in fact been declining over the past several years, nor have their annual maintenance renewals. Further review of the of the documents [...]
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, [...]
Outsourcing to Save Call Center Costs
Having managed a call center, I have always been a proponent of in-house call centers, but times are tough and they are changing. Every company today is looking for ways to save money without hurting sales and customer service. As the pressure on businesses to dramatically reduce costs intensifies, you need to look at domestic [...]
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 [...]
Is There a Wall Between IT and the Rest of the Company?
Here’s the picture: A multichannel company with sales of $20 million has an aging order management system that has been in place for over 20 years. While there are some things that the users like about it, they have basically outgrown the system. They need far better marketing information, e-commerce site [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
10 Critical Mistakes in Selecting Order Management and Warehouse Management Systems
This past week, I had a call from a multichannel company about why their order management system selection process had failed. In their case, they signed the vendor agreements prematurely only to find out that the bid was incomplete. There weren’t any estimates for modifications, interfaces, conversion and training. As a result they had been [...]
Dydacomp is sold – and is one of the buyers
Milestone Partners and co-investor Continental Investors announced on January 15 that they had completed the acquisition of D.A. Kopp and Associates and certain affiliated entities, together doing business as “Dydacomp.†The following day, investment bank Berkery Noyes announced that it represented D.A. Kopp & Associates, Inc., Card Management Services, LLC, and Card Financial Services, LLC [...]
