As e-commerce grows, UPS broadens its e-commerce strategy
Retail is keeping the United Parcel Service’s e-commerce operation busy: it now receives an astonishing 7.9 million online package tracking requests per day, a far cry from the 100,000 it received on average per month in 1995. It’s one indication of the increasing technical savvy and information demands of both UPS’s business customers and the consumers they serve, which in turn is one reason UPS has been broadening its e-commerce strategy, UPS vice president of electronic commerce marketing Jordan Colletta tells InternetRetailer.com
Technology has taken UPS beyond its earlier history as small package shipper into a new arena in which it works deeper in its customers’ supply chain as a partner in what it calls synchronized commerce. "Using technology to help our customers achieve business results has really been fruitful. We wanted to make sure as things become more complex moving forward and customers` technical sophistication continues to grow that we are able to story ahead of that,” says Colletta.
Under that strategy, UPS has developed online tools that give customers access to UPS tracking systems and service selection, address validation, signature tracking and more. To help its business customers configure those tools to their needs, UPS has added 350 e-commerce sales specialists and will in December complete "e-commerce university" training of its 3,100 regular sales reps, a process that’s taken three years.
Today, about 60,000 retailers and other business customers are licensed to use the tools UPS has developed to manage shipping and package logistics. Best Buy, for example, worked with UPS to improve the management of its shipping program. It was one of the first retailers to test a hosted service solution, CampusShip, which let Best Buy set administrative rules by store across 400 stores, according to individual needs. One store, for example, might get online access to the full range of UPS services, including air, international, ground and more, while another that needs only ground service has online access to and visibility into only that service. “They can manage that online access with the features we provide,” says Colletta.
In another offering of UPS’s expanded services, retailers and other shippers can associate cost centers, customer ID numbers and the like with each shipment when entering shipping data online so that the cost of each shipment can be allocated to a department, division or store and the data fed back directly into the merchant’s accounting system for easy P&L accountability, Colletta says.
“We try to position ourselves so as to provide business enablement for our customers to get to their customers," says Colletta. For example, although it also offers package tracking at UPS.com, UPS works with its retailer customers to put that visibility on the retailer’s web site as well. “We provide our business customers with that ability, so that when their customers want package visibility, they come back to the merchant’s web site, which provides not only that service, but another opportunity for an upsell or an offer of some associated service to that customer,” Colletta says. “We live in a time where information has become so available that this has all become a natural extension of the shipment service itself.”
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