CNET Channel's DataSource Powers Caloga's E-commerce Platform

Since its creation, Caloga, a web site providing information on IT hardware and software, has used the DataSource online catalog from CNET Channel.

The Caloga website provides visitors with information on computer hardware and software. Ever since it was created, CALOGA has used DataSource™, the catalog maintenance service from CNET Channel.

Caloga provides value-added services and up-to-date, leading edge information to enterprises, professionals and private individuals who may sign up for a free subscription to the Caloga newsletter.

There are currently four types of information services available from Caloga:

• detailed product data sheets
• search and product comparison engine
• search and price comparison engine
• software downloading facilities for: freeware, shareware, and software demos

The founders of Caloga had, right from the beginning, planned on outsourcing product data management. They were well aware of the difficulties involved in providing granular, comprehensive and timely product information in a sector where multiple products abound, and where specifications change at a rapid pace.

"Handling product information in the computer sector, where products are legion and life cycles are short, is the kind of service that typically derives benefit from being outsourced to experts. To my way of thinking, it would be hard to do this profitably in-house. CNET Channel, with its DataSource service and Transactive Product Data technology, offers true expertise and proven technology," declares Stephane Landry, Marketing Director of Caloga.

He specifies: "As compared with the only known competitor on the market at that time, the American company pcOrder.com, the CNET Channel database was the solution of choice when it came to providing exhaustive content of quality, thanks to efficient and constant dynamic data updates."

He adds: "With DataSource, website visitors benefit from a comprehensive pool of product data sheets (35,000 articles online to date!), complete with product photographs and detailed characteristics. Armed with this kind of comprehensive reference information, and thanks to the interface we developed, visitors can easily perform effective product searches and comparisons for multiple products using a variety of highly targeted search criteria."

"Price comparisons may also easily be made. The purchasing guide function lets you select articles of interest and immediately display price and availability from merchant sites. What's original, and extremely useful, is that the comparisons are based on product data sheets that are derived directly from manufacturers' reference documents. Comparisons are naturally much more accurate. I'd say that's really the strongest selling point of the DataSource service: it provides an ideal response to the number one customer requirement, which is to optimize product searches, in order to buy or prescribe the right product at the best possible price."

"Investing in a tool like DataSource has provided a competitive advantage for Caloga.com, enabling us to attract new users and develop customer loyalty- simply by providing a quality interface. In an average month in 2002, we had 400,000 visitors to our site; given the figures that are coming in from the 1Q 2003, we will be hitting 600,000 soon. In addition, 40% of visitors to the site are professionals, which is a much better average than on most e-commerce Web sites."

DataSource from CNET Channel provides customers with daily data feeds in standard Transactive Product DataT technology (TPDT*) format, which Caloga.com injects directly into its product offering. The DataSource service includes the initial enrichment of its product catalog, as well as maintenance and regular updates to each article. By using TPD, customers can add transactive functionalities to their web sites such as product displaying, browsing, search-by-product attributes, comparing and configuring.

DataSource from CNET Channel now has more than one million product references online: all current IT products, such as computers, peripherals and software; and popular mass-market electronics goods such as digital cameras, pocket computers, and mobile phones.

TPD is the result of our data production, an important value-adding process, that takes highly unstructured, multi-vendor product information and transforms it into highly structured product data (consistent regardless of the vendor). With its 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.

About Caloga

Founded in 2000, the caloga.com  website provides information on computer hardware and software, with a view to helping users optimize their purchasing processes or buying decisions. Caloga provides value-added services and up-to-date, leading edge information to professionals, such as highly structured and up-to-date product data sheets, enabling users to compare characteristics and prices of articles from multiple vendors, and to obtain up-to-date availability. Caloga lso provides users with a free software downloading service. Caloga currently employs 12 members of staff.