Help your customers stay ahead of the competition and keep up with your resellers

26/10/2006 by paul

Amongst the most important things a business can offer it's customers is timely updates to pricing and stock availability information. All too often, resellers are provided with an aesthetically pleasing website with real-time data, but is this the best use of web communication?

Few online resellers now will be able to operate without using technologies like ASP or PHP in combination with MySQL or MS-SQL databases. Using simple scripting, these databases are able to create, populate and update tables with information located anywhere online. A CSV or XML file located in a distributor's web or FTP folder represents Internet Nirvana, and something that distributors have offered our UK customers for some time, so why the delay in Australia?

Currently, information from distributors is disseminated in two ways: by email and by web. Email notifications are normally cut-and-paste tables; websites require manual interaction with logins, etc. Turning either into practical, accessible data on a website is an unnecessary and often arduous task. By simply providing this data in a fixed-format table (you just need to save the same spreadsheet as CSV and put it on your website) your customers are able to run periodic updates of their own information directly from the distributors information. Couple this with an automatic pricing policy and you need never copy and paste an emailed table again.

This is a particular bone of contention for many online reselling businesses I know so I'll be revisiting the subject often. If you'd like to get ahead of your competition and want more information in the meantime, please get in touch!

Keywords :  csv, xml, prices, information, distribution, resellers, b2b,