eBay France Selects CNET Channel to Optimize its Mobile Phone Category Auctions
CNET Channel delivers a complete and standardized mobile phone catalog that helps eBay.fr sellers include detailed product content at auction

PARIS, France – April 14, 2005 CNET Channel, a leading independent source of on-demand technology product information, announced today the general availability of ChannelOnline 4.0. The 4.0 release offers a broad range of new sourcing, quoting, order management and e-commerce capabilities designed to integrate and streamline every step of the sales cycle. With this comprehensive solution, small to mid-sized value added resellers (VARs) can match or exceed the customer service, operational efficiency and sophisticated sourcing of their larger competitors.

eBay, the World’s Online Trading Marketplace®, has more than 135 millions of members registered and 44 millions products distributed every day in over a thousand different categories. The company has selected CNET Channel’s DataSource™ solution to setup product content on its “Telephony” category. eBay provides a content database of mobile phones where sellers and buyers can easily find their products. It takes a few seconds for a buyer to add new features to the mobile phone he or she wants to auction.

A New eBay Service with Real Added-Value

With DataSource, eBay.fr is able to provide buyers and sellers with a real added-value service combined with exceptional performance in transactions.

eBay.fr‘s sellers will not have to write the description of the telephone they auction. They will only have to identify the brand, model or insert the serial number of the phone and validate it. This will ensure that the product’s content will show up automatically. Sellers can chose between the two following options:

• Publication of standardized information, which conforms to a simple criteria, such as brand, model or serial number
• Personalization of certain details to empower the seller At the same time, buyers will be able to search more accurately through different criteria such as, brands, models, types, camera quality and security.

Today, product content provided by CNET Channel contains more than 1,000 mobile phones ready for auction on eBay.fr. The DataSource solution can be deployed and scaled to a very large amount of users without requiring new development for other eBay product categories.

DataSource™ – The Most Complete Catalog of Technology Product Content in the World
DataSource™ is a dynamic product catalog maintenance solution that transforms product information on over 2,000,000 IT and consumer electronics SKUs into a standardized product database. CNET Channel enables eBay.fr to optimize its Telephony portfolio with enhanced transactive features such as classification, specifications, attribute search, comparison of technical specifications.

“Our team’s deep experience in this market enables us to better understand our customer’s needs and expectations. This helps us to support eBay in implementing DataSource solution with adapted services deployed in a worldwide environment. The project was deployed in a couple of weeks,” says Thierry Carra, CNET Channel Sales Director for France.

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CNET Channel Contact:
Scott Danish, Vice President, Global Marketing
scott.danish@cnet.com
Phone: +1-415-344-2722 [Mobile: +1-415-254-0500]