Tool Box
Issue No. 8 - December/ 2002/january
Stationary Multinational Develop Enormous Web Sales Success
Expressing E-Commerce
Stationery supply company, Corporate Express is an e-commerce veteran, having begun trading electronically in the late 1980s using a product catalogue on CD-ROM and an EDI system for ordering. Corporate Express software lived on the client’s system and clients’ logged on to do their ordering by item number.
“Just having a system in place gave us an advantage [as the electronic economy gained pace],” says CE’s South Australian chief, Rick Morris. “We used to go around with a PC on a luggage trolley to do demonstrations. One of our early clients was Flinders University, who took up our system in 1993 and helped with the IT development.”
At that time, Corporate Express was known as Macquarie Stationery, and the system was called the Macquarie Ordering Highway. With the change of name after a USA corporate buy-out in 1995, the system became Expressway.
Expressway became Internet-based in 1996 with the advantage that, Rick says, salespeople no longer had to visit clients to update their catalogue data.
“Because this is an in-house system we can upload images for any state. We can scan it today, and clients can be ordering it tomorrow.”
The South Australian client base adopted the Expressway system faster than any other state in Australia. More than 60% of Corporate Express goods are sold by e-commerce here; the national average is 56%.
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