Jeffrey Barry

Recent Posts

Fall/Holiday 2008 Results

Like many of you, we’ve spent the past two weeks talking with our clients about the results of Fall/Holiday 2008. Here is what we are hearing, along with what our clients think the outlook for 2009 is and some things you can do immediately to further reduce expenses.

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Free Shipping: A Database Marketing Perspective

Virtually every bit of advertising and promotional material produced by multichannel companies during the holiday season has contained a common phrase: FREE SHIPPING.
In preparation for an article that will appear in the February issue of Multichannel Merchant, we tracked hundreds of promotions that arrived in our postal and e-mail mailboxes from August through December, and polled dozens of multichannel businesses on their free shipping strategies. What we found was an unbelievable array of opinions, conditions, restrictions and timetables. What we didn’t find was any kind of consensus on whether free shipping is a strategy that works.

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Name Your Price: Multichannel Product Pricing

It's been less than a decade since the word “multichannel” came into use to describe selling through more than one medium. But the complex new world of multichannel merchandising includes potential pitfalls that at best may confuse customers and at worst will alienate them. Chief among these pitfalls: maintaining different strategies and tactics for different channels.

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Reducing Costs in the Contact Center

As this year comes to a close, many of our clients are turning their thoughts to how they can save money — both in their contact centers and throughout their operations — as well as starting to prepare for next year's holiday season. One of the best ways to plan for future success is to conduct a postseason analysis. In this first of a two-part series, I’ll explain how to perform a postseason analysis of your center as a baseline for customer service, process improvement and cost reduction.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to the postseason analysis.

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10 Critical Considerations in Selecting Retail and Direct Business Intelligence Solutions

Your senior management just read you the riot act about the company’s proliferation of systems and the lack of data integrity in those systems. “We have the same data—like sales and inventory—in different systems, with different timing and accuracy. Between our order management, warehouse management and forecasting systems, there is no single version of the truth. We are no longer in touch with the data, and the department managers are analyzing performance in different ways and getting different results—even though they are using the same data!  No one system gives us more than 25% of the data we need to plan and manage the business.  And we aren’t even users of the major business systems.” 

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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 to business systems interfaces, forecasting and inventory management, and the ability to deal better with light manufacturing and tracking sets and kits, which are a major part of their business.

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Achieving Higher Order Fill Rates Through Integrated Channel Order Fulfillment

Flexibility with inventory is key to maximizing sales in today’s economy, but a variety of challenges prevent multichannel businesses with direct fulfillment centers and retail stores from maximizing the inventory they have.  For instance, e-commerce, catalog and retail have different planning methods, and different accuracy issues; it’s one thing to get the size distribution right for a region and store, and another to plan for the way colors sell.  Many e-commerce sites will not take an order if the fulfillment center is out of stock or on back order, giving customers the erroneous impression that the item isn’t available from your company—even though it may be available in stores. And even if it is available, it may not be in a store nearby.  If you’re a retail company, you don’t want inventory riding around on trucks between stores or back to the fulfillment center to fill direct orders.  At the same time, if you’re a store manager, you don’t want direct orders to strip your inventory of best selling items if you don’t get credit for the sale.  All the channels—retail, web, catalog or wholesale—compete for best sellers.

Download: 14 Inventory Best Practices to Implement in Your Company

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Conducting a Post Season Audit on Your Fulfillment Operations

Although the 2007 holiday season hasn’t ended yet for many multichannel merchants, many of our clients are already preparing for holiday 2008. You should, too, by conducting a post-season audit. This process enables you to challenge your group to find ways to reduce costs and at the same time get critical data and observations to be used for the next holiday season.

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What Are Your Shipping Options?

In the next few weeks, all the carriers will complete their 2008 pricing announcements. As we look at the future, it’s probably a good bet that these carriers’ rates aren’t going down any more than the cost of oil. So what’s the impact and action plan for your business? Given the size of the increases that have been announced so far, multichannel companies need to look at all the options open to them and develop short and long-term strategies to reduce the impact.

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