A spreadsheet of 180 employees
In November an office manager emails a spreadsheet. Could you send a gift box of coffee to each of their 180 remote staff, with a personal message, before the 15th of December? Some rows have full addresses, some have a postcode missing, one has an address in Ireland, and the messages column contains a mix of "Merry Christmas!" and three paragraph thank you notes.
Somebody at the roastery then types each row into the shop as a manual order, or into the courier's website, one at a time, while the Christmas retail rush is running at full speed.
Each row becomes a hand made order
Online shops are built for one customer buying for one address. A corporate client buying for hundreds of addresses breaks that model, so the work falls back on people. The spreadsheet is never quite in the format anyone needs, and problems are found one row at a time.
- Address columns are split differently in every client's spreadsheet.
- Missing or invalid addresses are discovered at the labelling stage.
- Personal messages are copied into gift cards by hand.
- The client wants to know every parcel was delivered, and asks by email.
- Invoicing a single client for many shipments is done separately.
Why gift season hurts
Corporate gifting can be valuable work, but handled by hand it lands in the busiest weeks of your year and pushes everything else back. Typing errors send gifts to the wrong place, and each failed delivery costs you postage twice and a disappointed client. The client's own staff chase you for tracking information. Many roasters turn corporate work down or cap it for exactly these reasons.
There is also the question of timing. Corporate clients want everything to arrive in the same few days, often just before an office closes for the holidays, so the whole order has to be roasted, packed and handed to the courier as one job. When the list is only half cleaned up by then, part of the order ships late and the client remembers that next year.
The bulk gift flow we build
- The client uploads their spreadsheet through a simple page, or you upload it for them. Column mapping is guided, so any reasonable layout is accepted.
- Every address is checked against a postcode lookup, and problem rows are returned to the client to fix before anything is packed.
- Messages are checked for length against your gift card size, and any that will not fit are flagged.
- Once the list is clean, orders are created in your shop or order system in one batch, tagged with the client's name.
- Gift cards, packing slips and courier labels print together in the same order, so each box gets the right message and address.
- The client receives a single report with each recipient's tracking, and one invoice for the whole order goes to your accounts package.
| Step | Done by hand now | With the flow |
|---|---|---|
| Reading the spreadsheet | Retyped row by row | Columns mapped once |
| Checking addresses | Found when labels fail | Checked before packing |
| Messages | Copied onto cards | Printed from the file |
| Creating orders | One at a time | One batch |
| Client updates | Answered by email | Single tracking report |
Gift season, organised
A corporate order becomes a job you can say yes to. The client fixes their own address problems before you start. Packing follows a printed sequence, and the gift cards match the boxes. Tracking questions are answered by a report you send once. You can offer corporate gifting as a real product rather than a favour squeezed into December.
Is corporate gifting a headache?
- Corporate gift orders arrive as spreadsheets.
- Each recipient is typed in as a separate order.
- Address problems are found at the labelling stage.
- Gift messages are written or typed by hand.
- You have turned down or capped corporate orders because of the admin.