DVD Empire In Partnership With Electronics Retailer Huppins
DVD Empire (www.dvdempire.com) a leading online retailer of DVDs (digital video discs) and video compact discs (DVD-ROM), has entered into a partnership with venerable Spokane, WA, electronics retailer Huppins Hi-Fi, Photo, & Video, to become the exclusive online vendor of DVD and DVD-ROM titles for Huppins' Internet sales arm, One Call (www.onecall.com). Huppins is the largest single store provider of DVD hardware in the United States with 2.3 percent of all DVD players sold nationwide, or about 30,000 of approximately 1,3000,000 units for 1998. Beginning this month all Huppins online customers who click the One Call DVD link will be transfered to DVD Empire. At a stroke the deal enables Huppins to multiply its inventory of 400 DVD titles seven-fold to 2,800 -- all the DVD titles now in print. In addition DVD Empire will take over all the warehousing and order fulfillment which Huppins has done up to now for One Call DVD customers. DVD Empire maintains a 6,000 square foot warehouse outside Pittsburg, PA from which all orders are shipped. In return, One Call will be linked to DVD Empire as the latter's exclusive electronics hardware partner. The deal is a significant step for both partners. DVD Empire now ships about 1,400 units daily, a figure that is growing at a double-digit monthly rate. It's business is 100% online, and the vast majority of its customers return for repeat business. Huppins' One Call website, which began in 1994 as a response to market enroachment by upstart online electronics retailers, now generates 2,600,000 visits monthly according to Paul Lipton, Huppins Director of Operations, Mail Order, and internet Services, and enjoys one of the highest degrees of customer satisfaction on the Web according to consumer-based newsgroups who have measured it. One Call has enabled Huppins, a 90-year-old, fourth generation, family-owned independant retailer, to go from a highly respected regional concern to one of the premiere nationwide electronics retailers on the Web. The significance of the partnership for the future of online retailing was outlined by DVD Empire president Jeff Rix. ""DVD Empire's reciprocal deal with Huppins is what the future holds for independent retailers who want to compete successfully with huge chains and online goliaths,"" Rix says. ""Alliances such as ours with Huppins will be increasingly necessary. The nature of online retailing makes such alliances a very low cost way to expand product lines, inventory, and customer traffic in a way that files in the face of some high cost deals that have been done with portal sites. In Huppins we have a partner whose commitment to customer service matches ours, and they have proven it for nearly a century.