A Chat With April’s Profile, Tim Burns, brand manager of Edmund Scientific

CS: What role does the Internet play at Edmund Scientific?
TB: It’s key; it’s the primary order channel. We’ve always been ahead of the curve in terms of our customers using the Web as their order channel. Like everybody else, we’ve seen a huge shift in the last five years from the way people order: Via phone or through the mail to using the Web site as the order channel. But having said that, it obviously is really, really important. And we do very well with CPC [cost per click] and search engine marketing and affiliate marketing, but our mail order business has stayed pretty current. Our customers to some degree are still very old school. They like to get that catalog in the mail and fill out their order form and put a stamp on it and send it in. We still get a few thousand orders every year through the mail.