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The Business Challenge

Shopping destinations and infomediaries are among the leaders in their use of product information.  Indeed, many consumers use these sites primarily for "one stop" access to all of the product specifications, reviews and pricing information they need.  These businesses provide a great deal of value through their innovative use of information - enabling consumers with easy access to all the most relevant facts they need to make a purchase decision.  Shopping sites work hard to differentiate themselves in terms of how they deliver information, as well as how they enrich it with reviews and opinions.   

Keeping the attention of the technology consumer is a never-ending challenge.  Shopping sites and infomediaries need to constantly innovate new ways to make their site more useful, while ensuring that they provide all of the detailed information their customers need.  As new products - and even new categories - constantly arise, just keeping the basic information up-to-date seems an insurmountable challenge.  Shopping destinations and infomediaries are challenged to continue providing the innovative services and content that makes their site stand out from the rest:

  • The cost of publishing and maintaining an online catalog of tens of thousands of constantly evolving items
  • Concentrating resources on creating new comparison tools, information formats and informative content
  • Standardizing data so that customers can make easy and accurate "apples-to-apples" comparisons between multiple vendors' products
  • Expanding into new product categories while maintaining or improving the quality of product information

CNET Channel Solution

With CNET Channel solutions for shopping destinations and infomediaries, you can:

  • Ensure the most up-to-date and accurate product information
    • Deliver the most complete product information from over 3.2 million SKUs across more than 140 IT, consumer electronics, appliances and pro-sumer photo & video product categories
    • Be the first with detailed product information on newly-announced products
    • Avoid information errors, inconsistencies or omissions
  • Increase your pace of innovation
    • CNET Channel provides tools that allow for innovative and rapid design of new search and comparison methods
    • CNET Channel product content comes in a normalized standard format, so you can easily combine and present it in whichever way you choose
    • Avoid time wasted updating and correcting product information - concentrate on providing new features and unique content
    • Become the "ultimate research site" with efficient multi-mode search and detailed product comparisons
  • Position yourself for growth
    • CNET Channel covers hundreds of product categories, adding more all the time.  We have all the information you need today and tomorrow as you expand.
    • Reach out to global customers in their own language
    • Consistently recommend compatible and useful add-on products, upgrades and accessories
  • Minimize catalog maintenance costs
    • Eliminate most costs of managing your online catalog
    • Flexible, structured and standardized data is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and better-performing

Not only will CNET Channel's DataSource™ ensure that shopping destinations and infomediary catalogs have all the accurate product information needed to satisfy their customers - but our flexible data will enable new ways to sell products online.

CNET Channel's Memory Selector™ takes the pain out of selling memory by making finding compatible upgrades easy on consumers and profitable for you.


Resources

Follow the links below to learn more about how CNET Channel can help you solve these challenges and maximize the utility of your website.

Customers:  Here's a partial list of shopping destination and infomediary customers


White Papers

  • DataSource™: Content Delivery and Maintenance for Your Electronic Product Catalogs
    (December 2004)
    This paper will help CIOs and IT/eCommerce engineers in channel businesses understand the technologies that comprise the DataSource solution, how these technologies work together to provide the richest and most complete product information in the industry, and how their businesses can use DataSource to reduce operating costs and drive revenue.

  • Delivering Multi-Vendor Product Information to Facilitate Customer Purchase Decisions: Evaluating the ROI of CNET Channel DataSource™
    (January 2005)
    To demonstrate and quantify the economic benefits associated with DataSource, CNET Channel contracted Callan Consulting, an independent business modeling consulting firm, to develop a detailed return on investment (ROI) model. Callan Consulting interviewed a broad range of CNET Channel customers and gathered data from a variety of secondary sources to create the DataSource ROI model. As this white paper describes key ROI benefits, it can be read either as a stand-alone document or in conjunction with the ROI model. Please contact us if you're interested in having a CNET Channel conduct a 1:1 DataSource ROI analysis with you.

  • Communicating Trust to Your Online Customers
    (March 2005)
    Product information is the DNA of your online store or your e-commerce extranet/intranet. Without product information, no transaction could take place. How retailers/resellers support product information directly impacts their bottom-line results. Many, however, ignore the fundamentals by featuring inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent and confusing information on their Web sites. This results in distrust of the information customers associate with your brand and ultimately impacts your bottom line. In a sales channel where consumers can find the same product at many different locations, product information can impact your bottom line significantly. This white paper explains the seven key content characteristics that build trust and provides two case studies of CNET Channel customers that earned trust from their online customers.


DataSource™ ROI Calculator

DataSource ROI Calculator DataSource™ ROI Calculator  Now you can project how DataSource will impact your environment over a three year period. The results help you determine the costs and benefits of deploying a DataSource solution.