CNET Channel Powering Content

CNET Channel Drives E-business for WStore

Survival of the fittest has been the recent rule of the e-commerce world but in this tough economic climate, one UK and France-based e-business has gone from strength to strength. WStore believes a key part of this success can be attributed to its use of CNET Channel solutions.

When WStore launched in France, in 1998, its aim was to provide products and services to IT professionals online and believed the key to success would be its policy of investment in the consistency, reliability and quality of product information it was able to offer.

When the site went live, WStore published its own online catalog with thousands of items; technical data was entered and updated manually in-house. Management quickly realized that the outlay in labor required to collect and pool product data — and to maintain the IT infrastructure — could easily escalate out of control, due to the exponential increase in the number of catalogue items, and the number of markets and languages involved.

In 1999, given its rapid expansion and the launch of a new subsidiary in Great Britain, WStore opted to start outsourcing to CNET Channel's DataSource™, a service that features a daily supply of "on demand" Transactive Product Data™ (TPD) including an initial catalog enrichment as well as a daily update of the customer's product catalog.

15,000 online references managed by DataSource

"Maintaining a catalog is an non-negligible expenditure!" declared Roland Tripard, WStore's Marketing Manager. "We compared the in-house costs involved in feeding data into our catalog with the cost of CNET Channel services and there was no comparison. Today we are glad we made the move to DataSource because it allows us to focus on our core business."

"The results in terms of productivity were also impressive. Today all catalogue items are managed in-house by just two people in France, and one person in Great Britain. The reduced number of dedicated staff represents a truly cost-effective solution. It would require more than 10 full-time staff to maintain a catalog of this size in-house without the DataSource service. The CNET Channel data feed is a significant differentiating factor, providing us with a competitive advantage and true added value for our customers".

CNET Channel has developed patent pending technology and business processes around product data and product catalogs. At the core of CNET Channel's data technology is TPD, the result of its data production process. With TPD, CNET Channel has defined within the industry how IT products are categorized, described and documented to deliver valuable information to help users make well informed buying decisions and purchases. TPD has become the de facto product information standard for the IT industry as measured by reach, commercial acceptance and usage.

DataSource, the solution chosen by WStore, transforms, on demand, the customer's product portfolio into rich, granular, and standardized product data (TPD). Supplied over the Internet on a daily basis, customers can store TPD locally to populate their multi-vendor electronic product catalog database that will power their electronic commerce platform.

Important features

• Improved quality of technical product data - in order to meet the needs of online customers and to keep up with constant switching between new and old references (which are still used by some companies), a high level of detail is required. For each item, there is a granular set of data values, or "atoms" as well as ready-to-publish components, which can contain from 50 to 100 lines of technical specifications
• Optimized search engine performance - the key to improved customer interactivity. Since product data is structured and granular, online customers have access to search criteria by category, for all technology products available through the customer's electronic catalog. This type of search engine would be inconceivable without the use of formatted information such as TPD, especially technical data "atoms", which are easy to manipulate and index by both applications and RDBMS, the relational database management systems which are the core technology used in e-catalogs
• Enable instant comparison of competing products from different manufacturers - DataSource makes it possible to offer enhanced transactional features to online customers, such as item classification and display, attribute searches, and product data comparison and configuration
• Ensuring product compatibility - DataSource can manage product compatibility for a given brand. In the IT sector, product life cycles are extremely short. For this reason, keeping on top of product compatibility can be a difficult task

"We are extremely satisfied with the quality of service provided by CNET Channel, and we often recommend their services to our partners" said Roland Tripard. "CNET Channel is the first vendor to truly understand product data market requirements. CNET was attentive to our needs and has met our expectations, providing fast and effective solutions meeting our requirements."

About WStore

Opened in October 1998, WStore's objective is to deliver better information to businesses when purchasing IT products. WStore currently has in excess of 15,000 business customers; the customer portfolio is SME - large businesses. WStore's mission is to use the internet to provide business customers with excellent customer service, to continue to deliver value through innovation and to be the most efficient/cost effective platform to distribute IT Products. In 1999 WStore achieved 9M^ of sales, 30M^ in 2000, 55M^ in 2001. WStore is present in the UK and France.