MANUFACTURERS - How the Marine Product Index will help you

Electronic product information is becoming more and more important and as each year passes it becomes the staple diet of websites, brochures and pricelists. If you do not want to be an also-ran in the competitive marine retail environment then you have to be able to supply a lot of product information very quickly and accurately. Your customers, your customers' customers and your customers' customers' customers will all require electronic information about your products and you are the best people to supply that information. By using the Marine Product Index you can ensure that the same consistent quality sales message ends up with the consumer so that they know exactly what they need to know to make that decision to buy your products. Your product information will be used by your customers to help them sell your products so it is imperative you make it accessible in the right places, one of which will be here. Your customers will already intuitively tend to favour suppliers who provide accurate information. If you do not have that information in the Index you will make it much more difficult for your customers to collate information about your products and therefore much easier for your customers to sell your competitors products. Let us address a few issues you probably experience already...... How often do your customers request electronic information from you and how many people does it take to pull it all together? And do you do it just once or time after time? You may already point customers to your website for information about your products but when they have to do that for all their suppliers it really multiplies their workload. Your customers want one place to find the information they need in a consistent format for all their suppliers - why make their life difficult and give them a reson to use someone else? The Marine Product Index will help you speed up the process of supplying information and reduce the cost of distributing electronic product data. You will only need to supply the information to one place, MPI, and your customers will then be able to get what they need themselves in a format to suit them too. A customer asks for your advice on a certain type of product. How quickly can you provide this. Would you not like this information at your fingertips? Or better still for them to be able to answer the question themselves without having to contact you. 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.

Marine Product Index features....... For manufacturers the Marine Product Index can be used as follows. 1. Creation of your product portfolio. This will be a very easy task. You will be able to enter and update your products either directly through a screen or by uploading a spreadsheet of the data. Your products are then available for use by your customers. 2. 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. 3. 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 or to supply to customers who do not subscribe to the MPI. At a later stage there will be an option to directly supply this data to your E-Commerce system via XML Web Services. 4. Accessing Product Information As the Marine Product Index will become the industry's central source of product reference information you need to ensure your information is as complete as possible in our index. Your customers and potential customers will become familiar in using the index to find products to buy and sell. 5. Broadcasting New Product Releases If you have a new product then you can broadcast this fact to all your subscribed customers. This will make them instantly aware of the new product and they can then quickly add it to their portfolio ensuring that it gets to market in the shortest possible time. 6. Primary Product Promotion Ensure that your products are right in front of your distributors and retailers when they are searching the Marine Product Index by advertising on specific category pages.   At a later stage MPI 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 the product they are looking for. There will then be a list of retailers presented on screen for them which have these products in their product portfolio. For them to choose your products they must be in the retailers portfolio and to be in the retailers portfolio they must be in the distributors portfolio which means they must be in the manufacturers portfolio too. It has never been more important for you to provide this information if you are to help those above you in the supply chain. Therefore to get a head start you need to register now and to make your life easier you need to encourage your distributors to join too as after all it is through their portfolios which will help them sell your products. It really is a case of many hands working together to make light work of some very complex data issues.

Register Now To register please sign up at www.marineproductindex.com/register. Once we have checked your application to ensure you are a bona fide marine business you will be placed on the membership list. We will be placing restrictions on numbers due to initial technical constraints relating to the sheer number of potential products available for sale. Each registered applicant will be allowed into the Marine Product Index on a first come first served basis therefore the sooner you register the sooner you will begin to benefit from our service.