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When Something Clicks
By Bronwyn Fryer, contributing
writer for Inc. Technology.
Over 22 years Camera World Co. honed its
expertise in fulfillment, customer service, and supplier relationships.
Today, as Cameraworld.com, it can teach Internet start-ups
a thing or two about what matters most
It's a sodden, gray pre-Christmas workday in Portland, Oreg.,
but the jeans-sporting photographers who handle incoming calls
at Camera World Co. (a.k.a. Cameraworld.com)
are oblivious to the weather. Sitting in their white cubicles,
they dispel the clouds with their cheerful "Thanks for calling
Cameraworld- dot-com!" They repeat order information and occasionally
murmur soothing guidance to Ansel Adams wanna-bes on the other
end of the line, who need to know things like the difference
between the Hasselblad 203FE Medium Format Chrome single-lens
reflex camera and the 202FA model.
In the 20,000-square-foot warehouse behind the front office,
15 workers scurry down long concrete aisles, clutching sales
orders fresh off the network printer. To the casual observer,
these warehouse folk seem to have X-ray eyes. Quickly scanning
the metal racks loaded with thousands of indistinguishable-looking
boxes of equipment, they have an uncanny ability to tell a
box holding a $10,000 lens from a virtually identical package
bearing a $1,000 one. When they locate the box they're after,
they place it in a plastic tub; a bar-code check at the packing
station ensures that the order is complete. There, a young
man nodding to rock music on a boom box pours Styrofoam peanuts
into labeled cardboard shipping boxes and then seals the goods
with a deft pull and twist of tape.
Camera World's order-fulfillment and delivery systems have
stood the company in good stead. During the 1999 holiday season
many of the company's stalwart 300,000 customers came back
and spent an average of $600 a pop. And thanks largely to
the explosion of interest in digital cameras, sales soared
last year, growing from $80 million in 1998 to more than $115
million.
Last December the company's Web site handled an average of
25,000 unique users a day, and Web sales rose by 245% over
the previous year's figure for the month. (At the same time
mail-order business shot up 67%, and sales at the company's
downtown Portland store were up 22%.) Some 90% of Web and
mail-order shipments left the warehouse within 24 hours. Return
rates for Web sales hovered around 4%, paralleling the rate
of returns from the store and the mail-order business. "We
maintained heavy inventories to ship on time, and it all worked
pretty well," says Camera World's new CEO, Terry Strom. "But
one thing's for sure: the Internet is raising the standard
of performance for any retailer."
No kidding. This past Christmas season, during which shoppers
spent an estimated $6 billion online, saw many a Web site
disappointing customers. According to a November 1999 report
by the New York City Internet research firm Jupiter Communications,
46% of business-to-consumer Web sites took five or more days
to respond to a query, never responded, or failed to post
an E-mail address on the site for customers' inquiries.
"An
awful lot of Web sites don't realize that customer service
should be a priority," says Jupiter analyst Cormac Foster.
"They focus on customer acquisition but don't spend time on
the unsexy stuff, like customer-support infrastructure. Infrastructure
doesn't get you headlines, but if you don't have a staff of
people to take care of business behind the firewall, you won't
get much." Case in point: Toys "R" Us, whose online subsidiary
ToysRUs.com (announced with great fanfare in June 1998) found
itself suffocating under the rush of online holiday traffic
and was unable to fulfill orders on time. The company's back-end
infrastructure was built to send truckloads of products to
hundreds of stores -- not to ship single orders to millions
of consumers.
Don't call Camera World a "click-and-mortar" or an old-fashioned
retailer with a Johnny-come-lately Web site. Call it, rather,
a dot-com with lots of back-end "not-com" experience. Camera
World has long known that the boring stuff -- attention to
the fine details of customer service, simple and solid fulfillment
processes, and trusted supplier relationships -- is what really
matters. Unless you master those three areas well before
you put up a Web site, no amount of bells and whistles or
transactional and design prowess online will make the Web
component of your business successful.
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