With orders taking off–-it averages 5,000 to 7,000 shipments daily during peak holiday months--Cooking.com recently decided to scale up its fulfillment capabilities. It pulled fulfillment back in-house from a third-party provider so as to gain more control of the process and its costs and started looking for a system that would support postal consolidators and rate shopping across multiple carriers, while integrating easily with its existing Catalyst warehouse management system.
The retailer turned to Kewill Systems’ Clippership, a PC-based multi-carrier software and logistics system that automates shipment processing for UPS, FedEx, Airborne, the USPS and other carriers. The system supports a range of automated features that allowed Cooking.com to expedite shipping and mailing, and also performs automated rate shopping to determine optimal shipment rates and routing.
In addition to Cooking.com’s online orders, Clippership also handles orders placed through the retailer's monthly catalogs. All orders are packed, placed on a conveyor system and routed to one of five Clippership stations in the warehouse. From there, the automated process weighs each package, shops for the best shipping rate, and applies a shipping label to each package. The shipping information is sent back to the Catalyst system, which forwards tracking information to the web so customers can follow their orders online.
“Clippership gives us the flexibility to add carriers such as postal consolidators, allowing us to extend the savings of low cost ‘super saver’ shipping to our customers,” says Bryan Handlen, vice president of logistics at Cooking.com. “With cost comparisons just a click away, the low-cost shipping option definitely gives us a competitive edge as an online retailer.”
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