Five years ago, Cooking.com was launched with the mission to offer the best assortment of cookware, accessories and specialty foods available anywhere. Today, the company ships an average of 1,000 plus orders per day, and that number jumps dramatically to between 5,000 and 7,000 daily shipments during the holiday months. The jump obviously doesn�t faze its fulfillment group, as the e-tailing group recently rated Cooking.com as one of the top 10 B2C sites for service over the holidays.
The e-tailing group secretly shopped 100 e-commerce sites to help determine the state of online customer service for the 4th quarter of 2002 using specific criteria such as e-mail response time, clicks to checkout, order confirmations, inventory status and delivery time. In the end, Cooking.com was recognized as top-rate alongside other online powerhouses including Wal-Mart, Lands� End, Office Depot and HSN.
When Cooking.com first launched its Web site, all of its shipments were sent through a third-party fulfillment group. But with orders taking off, the company quickly realized it needed to bring fulfillment in house, and to do so, it needed a multi-carrier shipping system that would seamlessly integrate with its warehouse management system. Ideally, this system would also support U.S. postal manifesting as well as manage shipments sent through a postal consolidator, allowing the company to extend additional shipping savings to its customers. After evaluating various multi-carrier shipping systems, Cooking.com decided that Kewill�s Clippership was the best fit.
�Clippership enabled us to do our own fulfillment and integrated well with our Catalyst WMS. It had the functionality we were looking for including the ability to rate shop,� says Bryan Handlen, vice president of Logistics for Cooking.com. �Kewill has been very responsive to our needs and is quick to answer any questions we may have.�
Clippership is a leading PC-based, multi-carrier shipping system that manages compliance for the U.S. Postal Service and other parcel and less-than-truckload carriers. Clippership is certified through the U.S. Postal Service�s Manifest Analysis and Certification process and supports an array of easy, automated features, enabling businesses to expedite their shipping and mailing processes. Clippership simplifies automation, supports flexible data integration and performs extensive rate shopping to determine optimal shipment rates and routing.
In addition to its Web storefront, Cooking.com also receives orders placed through its monthly catalogs. Today, all orders are packaged and placed on a conveyor system, which routes them to one of five Clippership stations. From there, each package is weighed, rate shopped and given a shipping label. All of the shipping information is then sent back to Catalyst WMS, which sends tracking information to the Web so customers can easily track their orders online.
�Clippership benefits you as a vendor by giving you the flexibility to add on carriers such as a postal consolidator, allowing us to extend the savings of low-cost �super saver� shipping to our customers,� says Handlen. �With cost comparisons just a click away, the low-cost shipping option definitely gives us a competitive edge as an online retailer.�
For more information about Clippership, visit Kewill online at www.kewill.com.
