SEC Filings Section 16 Filings Only
 
PFSWEB INC filed this 8-K on 04/04/2007.
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  PFSweb, Inc.     PFSW     Q4 2006 Earnings Call     Apr. 2, 2007
 
  Company 5     Ticker 5     Event Type 5     Date 5
                   
<Q>: Mark, I’ll take it from a different angle. Just as you go into eCOST here, it seems the driver is you’ve got to get the revenues up and you’ve got to get the traffic up. Let’s take it from element of what to take [ph] really going to do that [ph]. If we go with your expertise that you’ve improved the infrastructure but it’s about the marketing initiatives to really drive the traffic, and what is that going to cost? How soon do you think that can be ramped upwards where it’s meaningful where you don’t have the gap between run rate and the break even point that you have now?
<A – Mark Layton>: Well the big challenge that we’ve had in the business has to do with the fact that the click charges on the shopping bots which was a primary driver of activity to the eCOST Website had gone up significantly in the last 14 months. When we acquired the business last year, we were probably looking at an average of 50 or 60 cents per click. Over the holidays, that got up to over $1.10 per click, and so we have backed way off in terms of that and that has an impact in terms of driving traffic to the site and ultimately on growth. But as I mentioned, our focus has been on reducing the break-even point of the business in ‘06 and not really on revenue growth.
So the short answer to your question is it’s probably not by just increasing ad spend on online advertising. The activity that we’re undertaking right now has to do with the fact of expanding our e-mail marketing. We have done a number of things to try to not only better target e-mails, and much of this has not yet gotten us results because we are just beginning to do this now, as we had begun to focus on growth really only in the last six weeks or so have we gotten our head back on how are we going to grow the business going forward? But targeted e-mail marketing is important for us in terms of — because we see high response [indiscernible] marketing list now.
Secondly is the growth in offline advertising activity. We have made some investments in radio advertising. We’re going to be doing more in the catalog front. That will go out in the next few weeks, where we have seen in the test markets we’ve done this over the last couple of months; good response rates from those types of things. And at this point with the online costs being as high as they are, those are more cost effective customer acquisitions tools for us from there.
Again, we just have not done a lot of investment in new customer acquisition in the last six months as we went through this transition period. Just in the last few weeks we’ve begun to focus attention on what we’re going to do and I’m hopeful that the growth results will come throughout 2007.
<Q>: Okay, do you expect to do any hires in terms of marketing personnel or do you feel you have the people in place that know what to do and to implement the plan and drive it?
<A – Mark Layton>: Well we are using rather than hiring ourselves, we’re using outside, I don’t know if contractors are the right word, but outside agencies that have specialties in certain areas. And so that’s where our focus is at right now. We’ve had a number of people involved in the business and through that have developed the plans that we have put in place. Some of these guys are PhDs that understand the whole direct marketing area. Some of these are guys that have been involved in various successful online stories in the past that have done consulting work for us. And we’re also talking to other companies who specialize in customer acquisition and traffic generation for web sites. And through that we’ve garnered a variety of different things to help drive our strategy for e-commerce growth.
<Q>: Okay, all right, thank you, Mark.
<A – Mark Layton>: Thanks.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from John Fitzgerald from Bishop, Rosen & Company. Please go ahead.
<Q – John Fitzgerald>: Yes, Mark, throughout the course of ‘07 do you plan to meet capital by going to the markets I guess is the better question?

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