Who of American colleges and universities, including Yale, Vanderbilt, Duke and Harvard. The company also counts the University of California, Berkeley, and other top West Coast schools as customers. The CMPExpress site offers secure credit card ordering, a unique guarantee of the lowest prices on the Internet and a real-time inventory service that allows clients to practically pick the product they need right off the shelves of CMP s warehouse. After opening the Web storefront, Kaufman found that government and educational users were reluctant to complete purchase orders over the Internet using a credit card. Therefore, CMP developed a system which allows users to create an account with the company via telephone, based on their credit card.
Users then receive a password which they use to execute Internet orders.
According to CMP, the new software which is available to Government, Education and Fortune 2000 accounts reduces the time it takes to price check multiple products by as much as 20 to 30 minutes. And Web searches that might normally take one to two minutes can be performed over the toll-free line in less than two seconds, the company says. Surprisingly, tripling its business over the Internet cost CMP very little in up-front cash. We started the process in late 1996 and had the site going full blast by early 1997. But for very little money we have provided a needed expansion of our services to the client and watched our business grow by incredible proportions.