CNET Channel's Product Data Allows Pomeroy to Save One Year in Development Time for its E-commerce Operation

CNET Channel's DataSource™ has helped technology channel Pomeroy transform its online e-commerce operation, increasing customer satisfaction while at the same time saving the company thousands of hours in development time.

By using the subscription based DataSource service, Pomeroy, the NASDAQ-listed technology and services company, was able to take its technology selling online business to a new level by offering smooth and efficient catalog browsing, product grouping and searching, and product comparison capabilities.

"Our situation was common within our industry," said Colin Erven, web development manager, at Pomeroy. "Our sales force had access to over 100,000 Stock Keeping Units (SKU) from hundreds of different manufacturers and suppliers, and our customers wanted direct access to that information. Due to the diversity of our data sources, the classifications and descriptions of the products were inconsistent at best, and  nearly unusable for e-commerce at worst."

Pomeroy's first e-commerce system performed fairly well, giving access to the entire catalog, but the customers were requesting a more feature-rich system than their current system could provide. The main issues were related to product searches and comparison, e.g, searches for a Pentium III computer would only return half of the qualified systems, due to inconsistencies in the product descriptions; and the terse descriptions themselves, most less than 60 characters, left Pomeroy's customers with many unanswered questions about the product.

"The decision we were faced with was to either manually re-key 100,000+ descriptions hoping for a greater level of consistency, or locate an outside source that could provide clean, consistent data on products across a wide range of manufacturers. That is when we contacted CNET Channel," declared Colin.

Better functionality - in a record time 

The DataSource service offered by CNET Channel provided Pomeroy not only with the consistent descriptions that they needed for their customers to effectively query the product catalog, but it contained parametric data, photographs, marketing descriptions and relationship data that allowed Pomeroy to greatly enhance their e-commerce offerings. DataSource transforms, on demand, the customer's product portfolio into rich, granular, and standardized product data, called Transactive Product DataT (TPDT). TPD enables customers to build an enhanced, multilingual, multi-vendor and well-informed purchase environment at a fraction of the cost of most internal operations.

"Whereas in the past, users were limited to searching for product by a description or part number search and a basic category/subcategory browser, now we could offer features like specification based searching, product comparisons across all manufacturers, powerful 'Related Product' listings and more," said Colin. "Making this transformation even more impressive is the fact that the entire primary development team consisted of only two programmers and the new system was completed in only two months. The initial estimates for scrubbing the existing data was over a year for several full-time employees, and that did not include the creation of the parametric data and other advantages that CNET Channel delivered, nor did it include the creation of the e-commerce system that would use that data. The time that utilizing DataSource saved our company allowed us to shave over a full year off of our time to market, which is a critical measure in the e-business world."

"We're extremely pleased that our customers show measurable increases in cost efficiencies and customer satisfaction with the DataSource solution," said Scott Danish, vice president of marketing at CNET Channel. "Pomeroy, like the 1,000 CNET Channel customers worldwide, has learned that by outsourcing data maintenance functions, it can focus more time on selling products."

About Pomeroy Companies

The Pomeroy Companies provide complete e-commerce infrastructure integration, broadband and desk-side integration services. The Pomeroy Companies have clientele across a broad spectrum of industries, governments and educational organizations. The Pomeroy Companies employ approximately 1,800 individuals, more than half of whom are technical personnel, and maintain 30 regional facilities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. For the year ended January 5, 2002, the Companies reported revenues of $809 million.