Retail & e-commerce | Outsourcing Center

Ordering Online Produces A Catalog of Benefits for Quill

Outsourcing Center, Bruce McCracken, Business Writer

For Quill, a mail order office supply retailer based in the Chicago suburb of Lincolnshire, eCommerce in the late 1990s was a lucrative and untapped marketing channel. Its first Web site, launched in 1996, was rudimentary. We figured that everybody has one, so we better get one up, too. We did not pay a lot of attention to it. It was not a focused effort, says Lisa Iannuzzelli, senior Internet marketing manager. Email marketing, which Quill decided to do itself, included converting its printed newsletters to email.

Barking Up The Right Tree

Outsourcing Center, Bruce McCracken, Business Writer

National retailers face a challenge when they enter the professional services sector. In the area of medicine, many customers view multiple location clinics with apprehension. They conjure up images of inexperienced, overworked and underpaid interns dispensing medical solutions on an assembly line.

Downtime Detour

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Imagine that you own a retail gas store and the cash register goes down. You can’t sell gas or Twinkies. Now imagine, just for a moment, that you own over 1700 retail gas stores where this could happen. ARCO, a West Coast gasoline refiner and retailer, actually owns that many gas stores and a large convenience store network. Downtime can be disastrous, so ARCO outsourced its point-of-sale terminals to outsourcer, Getronics. When the Getronics help desk receives a call from one of the retail outlets, the staff diagnoses whether the fix will require a technician. If so, they must obtain the needed part from a depot, dispatch a technician to the site to install the part, and have it up and running within four hours from the time the call was placed — no matter how remote the location might be. It’s truly an extraordinary feat in logistics.

A Gifted Outsourcing Relationship

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Today the company, now called Send.com, has 20 different product lines, ranging from cigars to cars. The company partners with local specialty retailers to fill its orders and deliver its gifts. Like a winemaker mixing a champagne cuvee, Send.com has merged e-commerce with old-fashioned retail…

Lowering the Cost of People

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Initially, the e-commerce world was peopleless; there was a manufacturer and a consumer and almost no one in-between. Ironically, it is becoming clear that what is going to separate successful companies from unsuccessful ones in the evolving e-commerce world will be people. Outsourcing makes this possible.

Counting on Communication

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

From the Editor: Outsourcing drove down costs for Hallmark, which was the original intention. At the same time, outsourcing allowed Hallmark to sustain its high quality of customer service and satisfaction. Moreover, it’s interesting to see how this relationship grew and prospered over the years. Building on these strengths, the buyer continues to add more and different services to the contract…

On the Leading Edge

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Tony Macina, general manager for global service delivery for IBM Global Services, says that one of the most significant developments in the world of outsourcing for 2000 is that the motivation for outsourcing is changing…

New Dairy Product Enters Asia-Pacific Market

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

A Scottish surgeon had a vision of being able to improve the health of people in Hong Kong by supplying them with cows’ milk kept free from contamination. To that end, in 1886, he and five Hong Kong businessmen incorporated Dairy Farm and imported a herd of dairy cattle in order to lower the price of milk, thereby increasing profits for company shareholders..

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