Company Background  The Challenge  The Solution  The Result  Download PDF

Company Background

Stirring in the right ingredients 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.

The Challenge

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 . modify, and lacked any integration with inventory and accounting systems It 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.

The Solution

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 for the customer.