Merz Apothecary, a two-store retailer of health and beauty products
founded in 1875, has enough charm in its old-Europe-style boutiques to
attract busloads of tourists in Chicago, president Anthony Qaiyum says.
It also gets rushes of customers on its 15-year-old e-commerce site,
Smallflower.com, he adds, for hard-to-find products like $200 Dovo
straight razors with wooden handles and $6.50 bars of Vinolia soap,
billed as “the official soap of the Titanic.”
But until the retailer upgraded its order and inventory management systems along with a new e-commerce platform a few years ago, it was unable to handle sudden spikes in online orders, Qaiyum says. And for a retailer that had built its reputation for more than a century on customer service as well as unusual products, being unable to fulfill orders was a tough pill to swallow, he adds.
Read More: http://www.internetretailer.com/2013/06/26/how-two-store-chicago-boutique-handles-e-commerce-growth
But until the retailer upgraded its order and inventory management systems along with a new e-commerce platform a few years ago, it was unable to handle sudden spikes in online orders, Qaiyum says. And for a retailer that had built its reputation for more than a century on customer service as well as unusual products, being unable to fulfill orders was a tough pill to swallow, he adds.
Read More: http://www.internetretailer.com/2013/06/26/how-two-store-chicago-boutique-handles-e-commerce-growth
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