All | Want Fore! Christmas Is A Good Nine Iron (NAPSA)—You’ve got your eye on the perfect holiday gift for that avid golfer in your family: that one, unique club he or she has been talking about since last Christmas. So how do you go about getting it? You can go to a popular online retailer of golf clubs and accessories such as ProShopWare house.com. Each year, the holiday season increases the company’s international sales by approximately 150 percent as customers from Australia to the United Kingdom pointand click their way through their holiday gift lists. But the challenge is in delivering all these clubs around the world on time for the holidays—usually in just one to two days. So how does the companydo it? It has a secret shipping weapon that will deliver more than 340 million packages around the world this holiday season. “The success of our business lies in getting our products into customers’ hands rapidly,” said Todd McGohan, co-founder of ProShopWarehouse.com. “UPS makes this happen.” Prior to allying with the world’s largest package delivery company, ProShop’s international shipping was no easy feat. McGohan and his friend Tim Stallard had started the company as a way to make extra cash by selling golf clubs through eBay. Before they knew it, orders came pouring in and the two could barely keep up with demand. First of all, McGohan and Stallard were fulfilling orders the oldfashioned way: from home, by hand, with no way to organize inventory and lots of paperwork to fill out. And the duo was using the U.S. Postal Service to send orders to customers overseas, which proved problematic because there ProShop co-founders Tim Stallard and Todd McGohan teed up for a happy holiday season. was no way to track packages and delivery could take weeks. Today, ProShop’s process is as smooth as a putting green. The shipping manager downloads hundreds of orders off the Internet first thing every morning. Order information is automatically downloaded into UPS WorldShip software, which prints out shipping labels with tracking numbers. The company’s staff pulls prepackaged clubs off the shelves, labels them and sends them on their way. So orders that used to take 15 minutes to package and label now take two or three minutes. And customers always know where their orders are at any time, thanks to UPS’s online tracking technology. “UPS took an aspect of our business that was, at best, troublesome and, at worst, a disaster —and made it work,” Stallard said. “Now, international shipping is a cinch during the holidays and all year-round.”
