PC World Business Opts for the Breadth and Depth of CNET Channel's DataSource™ Solution

PC World Business, a household name in the UK and beyond, seeks to continue expansion throughout Europe. PC World Business offers a total solution for business customers of all sizes nationwide from their state of the art operations centre in Bury, near Manchester. As a top provider of technology online buying, PC World Business needed a flexible solution that would help their customers and also streamline internal processing. PC World Business holds over 40,000 products on their website with up to the minute pricing, stock availability and lead times, with a direct connection to their back-office system.

Customer feedback shows that PC World Business has taken the right decision when signing up for DataSource™, CNET Channel's catalogue maintenance solution. Customers appreciate the excellent online search facility that PC World business is now offering, which combined with structured and standardized product data has made it easier and quicker for customers to find the product they are searching for.

Positioned for growth with CNET Channel's product data

Richard Millman, Marketing Director at PC World Business, explains: We use CNET Channel's data to populate our web site with technical information on our range of over 40,000 products and the data is also used in the production of our offline catalogue and mailer program. Today we only use English and we sell only to the B2B market, however there could be a possible long-term use of CNET Channel's product data in other languages as the PCWB proposition takes off within Europe as part of the PC City program."

PC World Business produces an 850-page catalogue three times a year, and uses that same catalogue management system to feed their web site with technical data. Historically, a team of Database Administrators manually populated that system with product data. To increase product depth and range online, and enhance the catalogue production process, it was felt that PC World Business needed to look at an alternative solution of sourcing product data, to allow these administrators to concentrate on tasks beyond simple data crunching.

PC World Business decided to outsource their catalogue management and signed up for CNET Channel's DataSource service, which transforms, on demand, the customer's product portfolio into rich, granular, and standardized product data. Supplied over the Internet on a daily basis, customers can store the product data locally to populate their multi-vendor electronic product catalog database that will power their electronic commerce platform. CNET Channel's product data enables customers to build an enhanced, multilingual, multi-vendor and well-informed purchase environment at a fraction of the cost of most internal operations.

A solution that puts people to work

The benefits of using CNET Channel's DataSource solution are clearly spelled out by Richard Millman:

"CNET Channel's data has allowed us to automate a large proportion of our product data collection and processing enabling our database administrators to undertake tasks that add more value to the business and to increase our marketing program. Moreover, the quality and consistency of our online data have vastly improved. Claims and issues due to data errors have decreased significantly and we are able to quickly resolve the problems that occur."

Since implementing the CNET Channel DataSource solution, there has been great success in the growth rate of traffic to the website. This was defined as a key objective for PC World Business and CNET Channel has been able to add tremendous value in the efforts of reaching this objective.

"Online sales and visitor numbers have grown since DataSource was implemented and even though it is difficult to accurately say how much of this is solely down to CNET Channel as we have implemented several other initiatives, it is obvious that DataSource is largely contributing to the optimization of our online business."

Flexibility for the future

PC World Business is one out of many customers who are seeking a flexible solution that will help expanding the business in the competitive European markets. The number of products and the frequency of product updates are continuously growing and it has become imperative for technology players to create a central source for product data and to automate the catalog maintenance in order to remain competitive particularly in a multi-market environment. Partnering with CNET Channel was a logical decision for PC World Business.

Richard Millman emphasizes the reason why PC World Business chose CNET Channel:

"We chose CNET Channel because they are seen as the major player in this market, and there was also an existing relationship with Dixons Stores Group. We briefly looked at smaller competitors but they couldn't provide the breadth and depth of data required."

About PC World Business

PC World Business is a leading specialist provider of IT solutions to business and the public sector. The company employs in excess of 500 people and supplies products and services to more than 100,000 UK businesses and public sector organizations. PC World Business offers dedicated business account managers and highly-qualified technical experts to provide, manage and maintain business IT systems. As an independent reseller, the company boasts an unrivalled range of more than 40,000 products, all detailed in the industry-respected Definitive Buyers' Guide. The company offers a unique multi-platform approach to account management in order to offer the best in convenience to its customers. It has specialist Business Centers in each of the 135 PC World stores across the country, offering immediate access to around 5,000 products. In addition, the company offers access to its whole range - many with next day delivery - from its web site www.pcwb.com; by telephone and through a direct fax service.