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June 19, 2002
London, June 19, 2002 - CNET Channel, the online IT product information specialist, today claimed that UK distributors and resellers were missing out on opportunities to make huge cost savings and improving customer satisfaction as a result of out of date product information on their online catalogue websites. "There is no doubt that the UK channel needs to determine ways to utilize time saving technology to keep pace with its global competitors," said Albert de Heer, President of CNET Channel. "Although research carried out in 20022 showed that 35% of UK resellers planned to use the Internet as a supply management tool over the next two years, many UK resellers have yet to embrace the opportunities that online business tools can offer. In today's economic environment, where every percentage point of profit is vital to the technology channel, I would have expected the UK market to be more aggressive in its adoption of online technology." The Internet has become the new sales channel for technology products. 80% of corporate decision-makers say they search the Web to compare products and pricing. More than half (56%) of decision-makers use the Internet to choose a distributor and 39% of them order their products online3. Moreover, European Business-to-Business online transactions are expected to grow from £95.3 million in 2001 to £1 billion in 20054. Mr de Heer acknowledged that keeping online catalogues up to date had historically been a challenge for the channel. "Receiving timely and structured information from the product manufacturers has proven almost impossible when dealing with anything from thousands to hundred thousands of product references from different manufacturers and the cost of managing continuous updates internally has proven prohibitive," said de Heer. Forrester Research highlighted that "keeping content up to date" was the biggest concern for 60% of webmasters questioned for its "Rehabilitating B2B Content" report. Forrester also confirms that producing a single electronic product sheet internally can cost as much as £40. This can equate to the maintenance of a 30,000 Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) catalogue amounting to £1,200,000 per year. But CNET Channel claims this approach is no longer necessary with technology product data specialists able to provide automated updates in multiple languages around the world. CNET Channel has built a database of more than one million automated SKU technology product data and produces and transforms monthly over 40,000 products from 2,500 different IT manufacturers into highly structured product data, regardless of the vendor. Through CNET Channel's service, several hundreds of thousands SKUs are being shipped daily in 12 languages to customers in 40 markets across Europe, the Americas and Asia, reaching a vast community of 150 million technology buyers. UK based technology reseller Dabs.com decided to use CNET Channel services in 2001 and has seen a considerable improvement in customer satisfaction. An internal study demonstrated that 72% of Dabs.com customers believe the level of product information on the site is "good" to "excellent", a 20% increase on a previous study. In addition, upon using CNET Channel, dabs.com quadrupled the number of its available product references and significantly lowered costs related to its online database management. Today, dabs.com's 475,000 unique monthly visitors can consult, compare and buy from over 16,000 product references. UK web retailer Wstore has also made significant savings from using CNET Channel's services, reducing its online catalogue update team from 10 people to 3. Additionally, Wstore has implemented a consistent and reliable solution for both UK and France backing its international strategy. At the core of CNET Channel's data technology is Transactive Product Data™ (TPD™), digital, granular, and highly structured product data that can be stored in any e-commerce platform product database to enable Web sites' transactive functionalities (searching, comparing, configuring, etc...). TPD also enables the building of well-informed and customised product information pages. TPD is the result of CNET Channel's data production, an important value-adding process, that takes highly unstructured, multi-vendor product information and transforms it into highly structured product data (consistent regardless of the vendor) that powers multi-vendor electronic catalogues. The issues surrounding IT Channel content management are highlighted in CNET Channel White Papers available at http://www.cnetchannel.com/en/news/white_paper/wp.asp. 1Source: Survey PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Summer 2001 About CNET Channel About CNET Networks: www.cnetnetworks.com. # # # CNET Channel Kaizo |