Kauai Coffee Company Harvests Ecommerce Growth Using Efficient Endicia Shipping Solution

Kauai Coffee Shipping Need 

A leader in sustainable growing practices, Kauai Coffee Company is home to the largest drip irrigation coffee estate in the world, with 2,500 miles of drip tubing for efficient water and fertilizer application directly to tree roots. For years, the estate was a hidden gem, just out of reach for most visitors traveling to Kauai’s tourist attractions. In the late 1990s, Kauai Coffee Company moved its visitors’ center to a more visible location on the island, which dramatically increased tourist traffic. The heightened foot traffic awakened interest in Kauai Coffee’s nascent ecommerce and Estate Coffee Club business, both of which have grown substantially since the visitors’ center moved. Faith Soto, Kauai Coffee’s long-time ecommerce supervisor, faced a welcome problem: how to efficiently and effectively handle the ramp up in mail order sales. She was using a competitor’s postage solution, but all information had to be input manually — a time consuming practice that had to be abandoned once orders spiked upwards. At the suggestion of a U.S. Postal Service representative, Soto switched to Endicia.

Endicia’s Solution

In 2009, Kauai Coffee initially began using Endicia software to facilitate orders being shipped through the USPS^®. Soto appreciated the personalized attention she received during the set up and found the solution easy and quick to use, including printing labels with USPS Tracking. Within months of the Endicia installation, the company changed its ecommerce shopping cart software, implementing a solution from Nexternal. Much to Soto’s delight, she discovered Nexternal, an Endicia partner since June 2006, supported a separate Endicia software integration. Soto and her team immediately began using that integrated Endicia solution for domestic orders, while continuing to use their original Endicia solution to process international shipments. For domestic deliveries, once a customer’s online or phone order is processed through Nexternal, the integrated Endicia software program makes it easy to generate shipping labels and USPS Tracking from Soto’s Zebra printer. Labels are automatically populated with customers’ order information, reducing errors from data re-entry and saving time, and can be printed in batches to speed shipment processing. Since implementing these Endicia solutions, Soto estimates her department spends 50 percent less time printing shipping labels than with her old system, and the team prints roughly five times as many labels in the time they do spend.