Electronic product information is becoming more and more important as each year passes. If you do not want to be an also-ran in the competitive marine retail environment then you have to be able to deal with a lot of product information very quickly and accurately. As the 'middle-man' in the supply chain you have a very important role to play. Your suppliers rely on you to do an effective job of promoting their products. And your customers rely on you to provide sufficient information to help them sell the products they intend to buy from you.

However, very often you deal with thousands of products and getting all the information together is extremely fraught and long winded. Together with having many customers all demanding information in different ways you will literally be torn in all directions.

Let us address a few issues you probably experience already......

How long does it take you to add a new product to your website? Honestly. You may have a great content management system but adding products manually is still very time consuming if you are to give a complete set of information to your prospective customers together with good clear images. And what is the cost in manpower of maintaining all your product data, we bet it is a significant figure. And can you easily access the information to provide to your customers?

The Marine Product Index will help you both speed up this process and reduce the cost.

Your supplier provides you with an updated pricelist. How quickly can you update your electronic catalogue with the new prices and at what labour cost?

The Marine Product Index will help you both speed up this process and reduce the cost.

A customer requests information electronically but only the IT department or IT contractor is able to deal with the request. As you may be aware more and more business is being conducted over the Internet and in order to sell over the Internet the retailers need product information in the correct format. Therefore in order to increase your business it is imperative you get this information to them. We provide the conduit for this.

The Marine Product Index will help you both speed up this process and reduce the cost.

A customer/retailer asks for your advice on a certain type of product. How quickly can you go through all your suppliers brochures and then their price lists to compare them. Would you not like this information at your fingertips to be able to offer an instant solution?

The Marine Product Index will help you both speed up this process and enable you to provide more authoritative information in a fraction of the time it currently takes you.

Your customers keep contacting you for information about your products as a result of questions from their potential customers.
Most distributors do not supply enough information to help in the sale of a product. Fact. You may supply a title and an image and a little waffle but the consumer wants more, much more before they will decide to buy. Therefore they ask the retailer, you never gave the retailer enough information so now they are taking up your valuable phone time. Right? Great images and comprehensive details help sell a product but do you have enough information to start with? Do your suppliers give you enough information? And do they all give it to you in different formats.

The Marine Product Index will help you both improve the ease and speed of this process and reduce the cost.

Marine Product Index features......

For distributors the Marine Product Index is split into several distinct parts.

1. Creation of your product portfolio.

This will become a very easy task but you will initially need to request access to each of your suppliers product portfolios. You can do this through the service and they can grant you access more or less immediately. Once granted you will simply be able to select all or individual products either by brand or category from your suppliers portfolio. These are then copied to your portfolio where you can add or change any information before you use it for other purposes. If you have products of your own then you can add these too as if you were a manufacturer or distributor.

2. Update of your product protfolio.

If your supplier changes their prices or details or images they can do so easily themselves within the Marine Product Index but in addition all their 'upstream' customers (like yourself) will be notified and you can accept their amendements so that your portfolio data is automatically updated without you having to rekey all the data saving valuable time.

3. Allow and restrict access to your product protfolio.

Access to your portfolio is restricted by default. Other marine traders will be able to see what products you provide and will then need to request access to the information. Once you grant this permission they can then add your products into their portfolio. All sensitive data can only be viewed if you have granted permission so there is no fear of pricing information getting into the wrong hands.

4. Download of product data

You will be able to select either all or a selection of products from your portfolio and then choose which information about those you wish to download. This information is then put into a Excel formatted spreadsheet where you can easily manipulate the data for your use in your E-Commerce systems or for price lists and brochures. At a later stage there will be an option to directly supply this data to your E-Commerce system via XML Web Services.

5. Accessing Product Information

The Marine Product Index will become your central source of product reference information. No more trawling through brochures trying to find the product your customer is looking for. Everything will be in one place. Even your most inexperienced staff will be able to answer simple customer queries (which have long answers) and find out what is suitable and where you can get it from.

At a later stage the product index will be opened up to the general public for them to access product information. They will be able to narrow down their preferences for products until they find exactly what they are looking for. There will then be a list of retailers presented to them which have these products in their product portfolio. Once the retailer gets the lead you need to be sure it has come from your portfolio as they are likely to use the suppliers with the most comprehensively constructed portfolios as their preferred suppliers.

Therefore to get a head start you need to register now and to make your life easier you need to encourage your suppliers and customers to join too as after all it is the suppliers information which will help you sell their products to your customers. It really is a case of many hands working together to make light work of some very complex data issues.