Multichannel Surfing

So did you hear that there’s going to be a Free Shipping Day on Dec. 17, and all merchants are invited to participate? I heard about it, because I read it in The Briefing Room.

OK, that was kind of a cheesy plug for the new service of Multichannel Merchant. But I needed a cool way to tell everyone that The Briefing Room has launched, and why you need to visit it each and every single day. more

ACMA executive director Hamilton Davison will be our guest at 1 p.m. today on the first-ever episode of MCM Radio, Multichannel Merchant’s new Internet radio show, streaming live to your PC or Mac on BlogTalkRadio.com (and soon at MultichannelMerchant.com).

So why is Multichannel Merchant launching an Internet radio channel? We feel it will help us bring Multichannel Merchant’s coverage of today’s news stories to a whole new level. Not only that, we’ll bring in multichannel retail experts who will offer their tips and advice on everything from streamlining your costs to building a better Web site to keeping your operations under control. more

I was combing the wires the other day and I came upon this interesting video showing a demonstration of Sealed Air’s (actually, the Japan division of the company) new “pack in instance” protective foam packaging material.

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Sadly, the economy has forced me to drop something I have been extremely loyal to over the past eight years in this house: Cablevision, or more important, News12 Connecticut (Cablevision’s local news station).

Switching to AT&T’s U-Verse triple-play service this week was bittersweet (Hey, I now have the NFL Network and Cartoon Network West, so I can wake up to Aqua Teen Hunger Force). But the horrible call center experience I just had as I said good-bye to Cablevision took that edge off a bit.

Moral of the story: Your loyalty to a brand can switch in the blink of an eye when you get an extremely poor call center experience. And I hope my call was being monitored… and I probably need some anger management. more

I’m sure when a merchant screws a customer over, they never expect that customer to be a retail manager… or for that matter, the wife of someone who writes and blog about catalogers.

Lakeside Collection, meet the angry Ursula Parry… who just happens to be married to a senior writer at Multichannel Merchant. And neither of us are happy that Ursula is left scrambling to find replacement gifts for her 30-or-so employees on Dec. 23. Especially when she ordered the said gifts on Dec. 8, received an e-mail that they had shipped (and a confirmation number by phone from someone in the call center), only to find out tonight that the gifts aren’t even in the mail stream yet! more