As I near the end of the first year in my new role as Director of E-commerce, I’ve been contemplating some of the mistakes I’ve made. In order to grow and improve I think you have to both take an honest look at yourself and also be open to criticism from others. Pride makes this sort of thing painful to do,…
Recently, after months and months of trying, my employer made it off the Gmail spam list and back into the Gmail inbox. They had been in spam long before I worked there, so the best estimate is that it was like that for a year. I probably spent at least 30 hours on the phone over the last few months with…
Although I’ve been focusing a lot on the warehouse in these last few months, I’ve also been studying up on email marketing. I had the chance to attend the Bronto Summit as well as become a Bronto Certified Specialist. Email marketing was something that I didn’t have much experience with in the past so I’m really learning everything from the ground…
Developers, programmers, IT people, and whatever else the tech savvy people out there go by have become the most important and hard to come by commodity in e-commerce. Many proud business owners and executives will scoff at this and go about their day convinced they are clearly the least replaceable, but I disagree. In E-commerce today it’s difficult to find…
This is the second post in my series on warehouse procedures. I’ve spent the last couple months overhauling our warehouse so I’ve been doing tons of research on best practices for all things warehouse related. In addition I’ve had 3 warehouse workflow experts with 70 years of combined experience come in to review my setup and tweak it, so I’m pretty…
I’ve spent the last few months overhauling our warehouse so I’ve been doing tons of research on best practices for all things warehouse related. In addition I’ve had 3 warehouse workflow experts with 70 years of combined experience come in to review my setup and tweak it, so I’m pretty confident we got it right. I thought I’d share a…
A couple weeks ago I naively wrote a blog post about my success in reducing our warehouse lead time to 24 hours. What I thought was a done deal has actually transformed into my entire focus for the last 2 months! I’ve been commuting to our warehouse in NJ from Brooklyn daily for 3 months now and have racked up…
I think any business owner or someone in a management role will read the mantra “Hire Slow And Overtrain” and nod in agreement. How many of us actually follow these guidelines though? The problem is that most people in the position to hire are already too busy by the time they need that person, so you tend to hire the…
Typically when I need to learn about a subject I’m unfamiliar with I seek out the best books, blogs, and articles from experts on the topic, presumably like everyone else. Recently though I’ve read The Signal And The Noise & Liar’s Poker so my whole faith in “experts” has been shaken. Another one of my favorite examples of the truth about experts is this…
I sit here at my dining room table with a beer on the tail end of what has been the most ambitious and stressful project of my E-commerce career thus far. I’m two weeks in and tomorrow marks the successful completion of this project. The project I speak of is to change our fulfillment time from 7-14 days to 24…
