CompUSA 2008 Annual Report Download - page 40

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Our industrial products include storage equipment such as wire and metal shelving, bins and lockers; light
material handling equipment such as hand carts, pallet jacks and hand trucks; ladders, furniture, small
office machines and related supplies; and consumable industrial products such as first aid items, safety
items, protective clothing and OSHA compliance items.
We began to market our PCS ProfitCenter Software™suite of business applications in 2004. PCS
ProfitCenter Software™is a web-based application which is delivered as an on-demand service over the
internet. The product helps companies automate and manage their entire customer life-cycle across
multiple sales channels (internet, call centers, outside salespersons, etc.).
Sales and Marketing
We market our products to both business customers and individual consumers. Our business customers
include for-profit businesses, educational organizations and government entities. We have developed
numerous proprietary customer and prospect databases. We consider our business customers to include
the various individuals who work within an organization rather than just the business itself.
We have established a multi-faceted direct marketing system to business customers, consisting primarily
of relationship marketers, catalog mailings and proprietary internet websites, the combination of which is
designed to maximize sales. Our relationship marketers focus their efforts on our business customers by
establishing a personal relationship between such customers and a Systemax account manager. The goal
of the relationship marketing sales force is to increase the purchasing productivity of current customers
and to actively solicit newly targeted prospects to become customers. With access to the records we
maintain of historical purchasing patterns, our relationship marketers are prompted with product
suggestions to expand customer order values. In certain countries, we also have the ability to provide such
customers with electronic data interchange (“EDI”) ordering and customized billing services, customer
savings reports and stocking of specialty items specifically requested by these customers. Our relationship
marketers’ efforts are supported by frequent catalog mailings and e-mail campaigns, both of which are
designed to generate inbound telephone sales, and our interactive websites, which allow customers to
purchase products directly over the Internet. We believe that the integration of our multiple marketing
methods enables us to more thoroughly penetrate our business, educational and government customer
base. We believe increased internet exposure leads to more internet-related sales and also generates more
inbound telephone sales; just as we believe catalog mailings and email campaigns which feature our
websites results in greater internet-related sales.
We continue to have strong growth in sales to individual consumers, particularly through e-commerce
means. To reach our individual consumer audience, we use online methods such as website campaigns,
banner ads and e-mail campaigns. We are able to monitor and evaluate the results of our various
advertising campaigns to enable us to execute them in the most cost-effective manner. We combine our
use of e-commerce initiatives with catalog mailings, which generate online orders and calls to inbound
sales representatives. These sales representatives use our information systems to fulfill orders and explore
additional customer product needs. Sales to individual consumers are generally fulfilled from our own
stock, requiring us to carry more inventory than we would for our business customers. We also
periodically take advantage of attractive product pricing by making opportunistic bulk inventory
purchases with the objective of turning them quickly into sales. We have also successfully increased our
sales to individual consumers by using retail outlet stores. As of December 31, 2008 we had 29 retail
locations open in North America and Puerto Rico.