A small group of friends and food lovers came
together in 1997 and started an online retail gourmet food business called €˜The
Food Bunch' named after a twist on the famous movie titled The Wild Bunch.Today, the company that later
became ChefShop.com operates out of a warehouse with a retail storefront in
Seattle, and is dedicated to sourcing and selling the very best food and
ingredients on earth. ChefShop.com carries the largest collection of sea salt
and vinegars. One of the most unusual products they offer is a hundred year-old
balsamic vinegar costing $600 for a 100ml bottle. Famous chefs and movie stars
from the U.S. and five other countries shop online at ChefShop.com. ChefShop.com
runs on Everest.
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Managing inventory in a business like ChefShop.com takes a lot of time and
effort. ChefShop.com stocks up to 1,200 unique items at the store and 95% of the
items are available online.
ChefShop.com used QuickBooks for accounting,
and Wizard, a DOS-based catalog software system. The primary shortcomings of
QuickBooks were its inability to integrate inventory information and to reflect
changes made in the system. For the inventory process, ChefShop.com had to
manually count every item and tally that with the Wizard system, which was
always wrong,explains Tim Mar, President & CEO of ChefShop.com. We continued
to have errors; the system was hard to use and the functionality to modify or
make changes was poor. We had to start all over to track and correct the errors
manually.
At one point, ChefShop.com evaluated Oracle but
dismissed it due to its high costs and the long time required for
implementation. They also considered PeopleSoft, an online option that charged a
monthly fee, which did not appeal to Mar. ChefShop.com ran their web store on
Yahoo! Store that turned out to be initially inexpensive, and time-consuming to
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was a painstaking task for ChefShop.com to maintain inventory and process orders
received through its Yahoo! Store. When Wizard went out of business,
ChefShop.com started looking for an integrated solution and discovered Everest.
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The
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ChefShop.com now runs its web store on Everest, allowing them to grow faster
than when they were on Yahoo! Store. The greatest value to ChefShop.com is
having total integration between all areas of its business centralized under one
system: accounting, e-commerce, point-of-sale, inventory, and all other areas as
well. The synergy between inventory and web sales allows us to manage inventory
better than any system. The fact is that with the integration of POS, it is an
unbeatable combination,Mar says. Everest is the best option out there. Everest
allows us to do everything we want instantaneously.
ChefShop.com has cut down
on full-time staff, due to its new ability to significantly increase
productivity. Everest has allowed us to do things that we were not
able to do before. We ship out the same volume of orders with one person, which
earlier required five employees. It allows us to buy and sell gourmet food €“ not
manage a variety of computer systems.The ability to do financial and inventory
analysis has helped ChefShop.com; this was something they could not do before.
Mar adds, We did not have the tools and the time. Everest has enabled us to look
at our business in whole new ways.
As a retail store, ChefShop.com
run their servers at a remote location; in Mar's perception, Everest allows ChefShop.com's expansion possibilities to be limitless.
For the web
store, ChefShop.com writes detailed item descriptions and stores them in Everest
one time, making it easy to add and remove products with changes in supply,
demand, and seasonality. This feature saves ChefShop.com three person-hours a
day.
The company generates UPS labels right out of Everest for orders
being shipped. With tighter control over inventory and with no delays in
shipping, now we are able to make deliveries two days faster than we could
before; our customers are completely satisfied, and we owe this to our people
and to Everest.
When a customer shops online, ChefShop.com upsells
similar complementary products. ChefShop.com has an edge over other food sites
by using Everest.
ChefShop.com is able to keep operating costs down with
real-time control of over stock, and fewer people are needed to keep track of
inventory. Now our business is growing faster, as we are able to reach a broader
market with our web store.
ChefShop.com plans to use Everest's
drop-shipping functionality to ship Washington cherries directly from the
orchard, and to ship Alaskan salmon directly from the fishery, which will save
even more time in order fulfillment and ensure even greater product freshness
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