SEC Filings Section 16 Filings Only
 
PFSWEB INC filed this 8-K on 08/13/2010.
« Prev Page Outline Printer Friendly Entire FilingNext Page »
 

<Q — Alex Silverman>: Do you know whether everything is being stopped or just the promotions?
<A — Mark Layton>: Well, we have not had any reports of transactional e-mail is being stopped. So, e-mails that confirm orders or shipment confirmations, things like that are flowing. Those do come from a different IP address, so — but those are not being stopped. It’s basically all of our promotional e-mails that are being impacted and it’s not everyone. I mean, we’ve still got a good flow to corporate going on. The big issue really is with Google, Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail are the two major areas right now that we have seen changes in their algorithms that have impacted our ability to deliver.
<Q — Alex Silverman>: Okay. I mean, the reason I asked that question is, I’ve received e-mails in the past from e-tailers who have said, you’re not receiving our promotions. Please go into your spam box and mark our e-mails as Not Spam.
<A — Mark Layton>: That’s correct. And we’re undertaking similar techniques and we’re not a spammer. I mean, there is — the word spam is used loosely to describe maybe e-mails that people don’t want, but frankly what I see right now is the actions being taken by these major ISPs is really akin to your mailman standing in front of your mailbox going through your mail and saying, “Well, you don’t want this. You don’t want this, and you don’t want this” and throwing it in the garbage before he puts the rest of it in your box.
Most of these people have subscribed to our e-mails in one fashion or another or everybody has. I mean, they’ve had to have opted into our programs in order to receive e-mails. So they’ve made a conscious decision at one point in time to be able to receive our e-mail, and yet an ISP is stepping in the middle of it and saying, “Well, no. They don’t really want that.”
So, there’s a lot more to be learned on this and it’s an ever-evolving space. I can’t say that the changes that were made recently impacted everybody. I’ve got to believe that others are experiencing issues that are there. The biggest challenge for us is, is that we had evolved to where probably more than 90% of our marketing activity was e-mail-based and so, the impact on us was significant in terms of our marketing activity now that we have, because we just got limited to being able to deliver the message. So, thus we’ve opened up these other channels again.
<Q — Alex Silverman>: Makes sense. In terms — sorry, just to switch back to the pipeline. Can you give us a sense — a rough number, how much of what’s in the pipeline are folks that are new to the web and really new to e-tailing and how much of it is going after a competitive win?
<A — Mike Willoughby>: Well, I don’t have an exact percentage, but my feel is that a good percentage may be 25% or so of the pipeline is made up folks that do not currently have their own direct-to-consumer initiative. And I think that, you can safely put most of the CPG opportunity in that category. And so, while those are some very large companies they may not be large annual estimated revenue portion of the pipeline because it was starting from zero, the first full year run rate’s going to be much less than their total potential. So, I’ll throw a 25% number out there just as a rough estimate of that and answer that...
<Q — Alex Silverman>: Okay. I asked the question because, I mean — it’s pretty well known that one of your — well, your largest competitor has some pretty major client renewals coming up in the next year.
<A — Mike Willoughby>: They do, including some of their sort of long-term, tenured core category sporting goods type clients. We do see them in a lot of deals that we’re working on whether it’s a competitive situation or somebody who is doing eCommerce for the first time. And we’re very happy with the win rate that we’ve got to this point and we think we still are very positive and optimistic looking forward with the differentiation we have versus them. So, not a concern. And then I guess

13