Case Studies - 3D Joe

ShipWorks Helps Ensure Timely Delivery of Toys for Christmas

With over seven years online sales experience, Brian Almashie and his team at 3D Joe Corporation offer a fine tuned selection of high-tech toys to children around the world via their interactive 3Djoe.com online toy store and virtual arcade. The 3Djoe.com site is much more than just a place to buy toys – it is an experience. The store comes alive with an array of engaging multimedia elements, including flash animation, free shockwave video games, and audio descriptions of each product narrated by the fictitious 3D Joe character himself.

"We provide a fun filled environment for children of all ages," said Almashie. "Many people revisit our site to play our online games and in the process they learn about some really cool toys that spark their imagination. The entire 3D Joe experience works well to raise awareness of the 3D Joe brand and ultimately helps to drive our sales."

The 3D Joe shopping cart system was developed using Miva Merchant. Customers can browse dynamically generated product pages, add items to their shopping cart, and then checkout - shipping charges are automatically calculated at checkout using Miva Merchant’s UPS shipping module.

As online sales have grown, the 3D Joe Corporation has faced a demanding set of challenges. In the beginning, 3D Joe staff re-entered shipping information into the UPS OnLine WorldShip application to process all of their shipments. As sales increased, this data entry process became increasingly time intensive, and error prone.

Almashie was quickly in search of a more streamlined approach to order fulfillment. In September, he attended Miva Conference 2003 in hopes of finding a solution that would work directly with Miva Merchant and offer an integrated set of UPS shipping tools - he found exactly what he was looking for - Interapptive's ShipWorks software with UPS OnLine Tools built-in.

"Miva Merchant has been a great shopping cart system. As we grow our business though, we are really concentrating on value added solutions that will streamline our fulfillment and free up more time for what we do best - marketing," explains Almashie. "Rather than re-typing shipping information for each order, which is a time consuming chore, we use Interapptive's ShipWorks software because it works seamlessly with our existing Miva Merchant system. Now that we have ShipWorks, printing UPS labels takes only seconds and we can track shipments all from within one application. With ShipWorks, our UPS shipping process has been simplified to a few simple clicks, saving us many hours each day."

When the 2003 Christmas season rolled around, 3D Joe Corporation was fully prepared for the increased volume in sales. "In the last few days leading up to Christmas, we had about 12 people packing orders. Due to the volume of orders we received, 4 computers were dedicated to printing labels. ShipWorks and the built-in UPS OnLine Tools were truly indispensable. I can't imagine how we would have shipped on time without ShipWorks," Almashie said. "All orders placed before our cut-off time were shipped in time to make it under their respective Christmas trees. ShipWorks helped us in many ways to meet our Christmas delivery deadlines."

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