Just like chocolate, online orders can sometimes be too much of good thing
As Valentine’s Day approaches, candy retailers are gearing up for one of their biggest days of the year. After a previous year’s Wall Street Journal article citing its handmade chocolates suddenly swamped Lexington, Va.-based CocoaMill.com with more demand than it could handle, CocoaMill has since boosted its online order fulfillment power with UPS tools bundled into Nexternal Solutions’ e-commerce platform under UPS’s Product Provider Program. The UPS Shipping Tool alone has cut CocoaMill.com’s order fulfillment time by 60%, says owner Bob Aimone of CocoaMill Chocolate Co., which has store and wholesale operations as well as the site.
Prior to using the current version of the Shipping Tool, the company would receive the order online and transfer it manually to a UPS shipping label. Now, CocoaMill can produce a label directly from the shipping address as provided online by the customer. Skipping the manual retyping of the address also saved the expense of additional UPS charges for tracking down any erroneously entered addresses, Aimone points out.
“It’s easy to transpose numbers and letters. This way, we get whatever the customer enters as the address,” he says. Additionally, since customers can track the status of their orders on the site via an embedded link to UPS tracking, calls to customer service on order status have virtually stopped.
Aimone says the web has grown into the company’s largest sales channel in the 10 years since the company opened its doors as a local mom-and-pop shop. Valentine’s Day sales are expected to represent up to 25% of sales estimated at under $1 million this year. To generate that volume, Aimone depends on a mixture of offline publicity, search optimization and paid search on targeted keywords, maintaining a high position on one of his most productive terms, “chocolate truffle,” on top search engines.
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