SmarterKids.Com Ranks Among Top Five e-tailers for Holiday 2000

Bizmetric ranks online educational e-tailer as one of the top fulfillment providers for the much anticipated holiday season.

Raleigh, NC, January 30, 2001—According to Bizmetric, online educational e-tailer SmarterKids.com provided the fourth fastest order-to-ship rate for holiday 2000. SmarterKids.com had an order fulfillment time of 1 day, 3 hours and 9 minutes, compared to an average fulfillment of 4 days, 15 hours and 8 minutes. Order to ship is the time measurement which best illustrates the speed of order fulfillment and is one of the most telling metrics about an e-tailer's back-end order processing operation.

In July 2000, SmarterKids.com opened their new, fully customized fulfillment facility in Mansfield, Massachusetts utilizing Tompkins Associates' e-fillSM fulfillment solution. The e-fill solution enabled the new facility to handle 300% more orders per day, with a conservative capacity of 6,000 orders handled per day by the 2000 holiday season.

"With the help of Tompkins Associates and their e-fill solution, SmarterKids.com was able to provide the level of service that customers demanded for holiday 2000," says Mark DeChambeau, vice president of operations for SmarterKids.com.

The study also revealed that Internet 'pure plays' were faster at order fulfillment than their click-and-mortar counterparts, and that e-tailers can improve the speed of order confirmations, back-end order processing and overall end-to-end fulfillment.

"The combination of the great team from SmarterKids.com and our vendors allowed Tompkins Associates to provide an end-to-end solution that not only shipped fast, but also provided world-class shipping accuracy," says Jim Tompkins, president and founder of Tompkins Associates. "This has been an exciting demonstration of high productivity, accuracy, speed and the economic application of technology."

Bizmetric's Holiday 2000 Report is based on 311 orders placed by a panel of ordinary holiday shoppers around the US on 21 major e-commerce Web sites starting November 27 through December 24, 2000. Bizmetric's automated software agents, resident on shoppers' computers, tracked every order from the time it was made to time of delivery. Data was analyzed in real time by Bizmetric's back-end database. Bizmetric plans more reports in the future, as a means of showcasing its automated and highly scalable Transaction Tracking ServiceTM. More information on the report's methodology is available at http://www.bizmetric.com.

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