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.

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. Great images and comprehensive details help sell a product. And what is the cost in manpower of maintaining all your product data? We bet it is a significant figure and in fact to be truly open suspect that it probably costs you several £'s per product.

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?
Unless you have a very switched on IT department this probably entails a fair amount of manual manipulation within your systems. How would you like to make this much easier?

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

How many products do you have on your website?
The top marine websites have tens of thousands of products and we suspect that you have only a fraction of this, so just think of all the sales you are missing out on because your range is not broad enough or you are simply not found in the search engines for very popular products because these products are not on your site. There are many retailers selling thousands of £'s worth of the products which are not bought everyday but are bought sporadically. These are generally the ones with the most profit but because they are 'unpopular' the time spent putting them on a website may not be rewarded with sufficient sales. Nevertheless it is undoubtedly true that to increase your sales and profits you need to add as many products as possible from each of your suppliers, however this is an incredibly time consuming process and comes at a high cost...until now!.

The Marine Product Index will help your speed up this process and reduce the cost

A customer 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 with comprehensive details of all the options available?

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 retailers the Marine Product Index is split into several distinct parts.

1. Creation of your product portfolio.

How would you like to be able to add thousands of products to your portfolio in hours rather than months. 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. Updates to 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. 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.

4. 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. Because of it's product-centric nature and design it will appear high in the search engines. Consumers will then 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 portfolio. It will therefore become the ideal place to be seen as a potential supplier for browsing consumers. Therefore to ensure you get the referals you need to increase your business it will pay to have as many products in your portfolio as possible.

Due to the initial technical limitations of the software and hardware and the expected demand for this service we are initially limiting the service to the first 20 UK retailers to register. Once these are succesfully up and running then the hardware will be upgraded for the next batch of retailers. Therefore to get a head start you need to register as soon as you can and to make your life easier you need to encourage your suppliers to join too as after all it is their information which will help you sell their products. It really is a case of many hands working together to make light work of some very complex data issues.