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From Dydacomp.com...

According to a recent article in the NY Times, a small, but growing group of web retailers are making big gains in customer satisfaction by offering "auto replenishment programs." Or course, mail order veterans have known about these types of continuity programs for years. Ever since Harry & David pioneered the "fruit of the month club", auto-replenishment plans have had a long and successful history in the direct marketing industry.

In a nutshell, a continuity program lets the customer decide what and how much they need of a specific product or products in a given period of time. The merchant in turn arranges for that product to ship to the customer automatically in a sort of an "open ended order." Of course, you also have to enable the customer to periodically "skip" a shipment, put their program on hold (if they travel on vacation for instance), or stop the program completely. And, if you offer more than one program at a time, you also need to be able to track all of your customer's program participations quickly and easily. Finally, you need to be able to change products in a continuity program as required, as well as offer special pricing incentives on products in the program to keep customers subscribing.

According to the NY Times article, many big on-line retailers are benefiting from these programs with large numbers of customers taking advantage of the added convenience of not having to think about reordering those items that they use day-to-day. Those mentioned by name in the article include the Home Shopping Club (tanning products), Doctors Forster & Smith (pet food), and Alticor (on-line prescriptions).

If you're a M.O.M. 5.0 user, you'll be able to take advantage of the brand new Club Membership Plan manager feature. With it, you can setup and run as many auto-replenishment programs as you like. All customer information associated with each program is easily accessible from within each customer information screen, and last-minute changes to accommodate customer preferences are no problem either.

For more information about the new feature and M.O.M. Version 5.0 see the M.O.M. Version 5.0 Feature Summary.�

http://dydacomp.com/index-news.asp