FedEx Sees A Dot-Com PayoffFedEx Sees A Dot-Com Payoff

Investment and dot-com are almost mutually exclusive terms, but FedEx Corp. is spending money on FedEx.com and says the funds are yielding notable cost savings.

FedEx.com, which gets about 4.5 million unique visitors a month, is saving the company $25 million each month, CIO Robert Carter said at a FedEx investors meeting Tuesday in New York. The site gets an average of 2.3 million package-tracking requests a day, which adds up to savings for the company because no FedEx employees need be involved. It estimates that it costs 4 cents to track a package online, compared with $2.14 when customer service gets involved.

On another front, FedEx is looking into wireless technology to cut costs and improve customer service. In Asia, it's experimenting with a digital/ink pen called Anoto Chatpen. The cigar-sized device, made by Ericsson, uses Bluetooth wireless technology to transport written information, such as a signature or an address, into a database. Carter says the pen's ability to write using ink will be more "palatable" to users than writing without ink. He says people seem to need to see a trail of ink: "Ink is the missing piece from digital pens."