Fedex

FedEx Corp. is the premier global provider of transportation, e-commerce and supply chain management services. With annual revenues of about $20 billion, The company offers integrated business solutions through a network of subsidiaries operating independently, including FedEx Express, the world's largest express transportation company; FedEx Ground, North America's second largest provider of small-package ground delivery service; FedEx Freight, a leading provider of regional less-than-truckload freight services; FedEx Custom Critical, the world's largest provider of expedited time-critical shipments; and FedEx Trade Networks, a provider of customs brokerage, consulting, information technology and trade facilitation solutions.

The contribution of technology and online trade to its success cannot be over emphasized. FedEx has always been a technology trailblazer, and the success of fedex.com is testament to that. The company was one of the first to harness the power of the Internet and the vast new information pathways it opened up to provide fast, easy and convenient service options for its customers.

FedEx launched its Web site in 1994 with a bold new package tracking application--one of the first true corporate Web services.

Over time, FedEx continued to pioneer new technological territory, such as when it became the first transportation company with Web site features that allowed customers to generate their own unique bar-coded shipping labels and request couriers to pick up shipments.

According to the recently published report on its website, fedex.com hosts an average of 8 million unique visitors per month and handles on average 3 million package tracking requests daily. More than 2.5 million customers connect with the company electronically everyday, and electronic transactions account for almost two-thirds of the more than 5.4 million shipments FedEx delivers daily.

The fedex.com Web site is widely recognized for its speed, ease of use and customer-focused features. In an article published in Computer Bits magazine, an analysis of the US home pages of both FedEx.com and UPS.com were compared for speed and accessibility using the 'Web Page Analyzer' plus an additional tool to detect dynamic content. The result was as follows:

FedEx had a US home page of 56,775 bytes. FedEx's HTML file size was 22,779 bytes, with 11,614 bytes in two external JavaScript files. One CSS file contributed 3,222 bytes, while 14 images contributed 19,170 bytes to the total