Sell all the products from all your suppliers matched with full product descriptions and your margin on top - B2B and B2C

B2B IT resellers – Check out Modern selling

What’s included

• Connections to all your suppliers – plus the ability to include your own stock
• Full product descriptions. If you host with us we include Full Icecat at no extra charge. The datafeed only option includes Open Icecat
• A product information manager tool. This allows you to control the categories, brands, price ranges, products and much more that are included on your site / datafeed.
• A pricing manager. Dynamically add margins to supplier prices, set you own custom prices, have complete control over the margins you make and set.

IT Products

For IT product descriptions and technical specifications, we have a prime partnership with Icecat, a leading provider of product data. This partnership allows you to have access to all of their content when you host your Webstore with us. If you host your own Webstore, our licence with Icecat still allows us to provide category and attribute data, thumbnails and a main image for in your custom catalogue. We then provide an iFrame for the full Icecat content.

Ink and Toner Products

We partner with Bechlem, the most comprehensive database of toners and printers in the world, including compatible, re-manufactured and original brands. The advantage of using Bechlem for product data is that they provide the compatibility relationship between printers and cartridges. This allows searching by printer model to find the correct consumable.

Office Products

We primarily use Icecat for branded product data. For own-brand products, we import data supplied by the British Office Supplies and Services (BOSS) Federation. The alternative category structure offered by BOSS, which is compatible with both VOW and Spicers, is automatically implemented by our system. We also import specialised content for Spicers directly from Open Range.

Custom Product Descriptions

We offer a number of ways to add your own product descriptions and amend supplied descriptions, including:

• Upload a file containing your own product descriptions.
• Upload* other third party content providers’ or suppliers’ content.
• Edit the supplied product descriptions directly on the portal, either individually or via ‘bulk edit’ – see below.
• Prioritise the content suppliers according to your preference (e.g. Icecat, then Midwich, then CNet).

*Charges may apply if the data format is incompatible with our standard data import tool.

Enhance supplied data with Bulk Edit

The Portal provides tools to improve the product descriptions in bulk by creating additional data quality rules in our system (e.g. adding default images to products listed without, adding custom descriptions to products without, automatically categorising products).

You Own Stock

Include your own stock, niche or contract suppliers

We appreciate that you may offer your customers unique products not offered by traditional distributors, including what you have manufactured or imported yourself.

Private Data Tool

Adding your own stock or other suppliers

Our system allows you to include your own stock or suppliers that are not listed on Stock in the channel publicly. In the UK there are 120 public suppliers that you can easily add, however customers have up to 130 supplier feeds coming in (80 of the public suppliers and 50 private).

Private suppliers work in a similar way to the suppliers we list openly in that the products are matched with product descriptions and margin rules can be applied. Generally you have an automatic process where a file is either pushed or pulled from an FTP location. There are a few important differences:

• Ability to manually upload a spreadsheet to include products that don’t change often
• Choose to prioritize the feed – this means that any other suppliers of the same product are ignored.
• Select not to apply pricing rules to products in the feed, this allows you to strategically price these items – after all if it is your own stock you want to sell it irrespective of how much it cost you

• Required information
• Manufacturer SKU
• Brand
• Product Name
• Stock Level
• Price
• Optional
• Distributor SKU
• Main Image Url
• Image Thumbnail Url
• RRP
• EAN
• Weight
• Category
• Short Description
• Long Description

File formats

xls, xlsx, csv or delimiter of your choice. No column order is required as this is mapped in the wizard. You may also use an archive (.zip or .7z) containing your file.

Update options

Collected from your FTP site or pushed to our FTP site or manually uploaded.

Security

Username and password login and remote folder definition supported.

Mapping the data

You can include headers in your file and can choose which column matches which piece of information in our system

Issues

• Poor quality data – missing and inconsistent information cannot be uploaded
• Longer tail suppliers may be less accurate
• Duplicate part numbers – if more than one product has the same part number but a different brand – both will be excluded. Poorly thought out part numbering such as hp-0001 and on used by more than one private supplier cause errors
• Lack of brand mapping. Our system has brand mapping tables so we group HP – Hewlett packard – HPtoner and many other combinations under the same brand. However with private datafeeds the brand names may be completely diverse

Bear in mind that private datafeeds can be included on the sourcing view within our site – but not published to the web store. So for example you may be able to see broker stock you have uploaded as you browse our site but would never sell this on your web site.

This solution can be tried out on our demo site. http://demo.stockinthechannel.com/ Find the link to the private datafeed wizard on the “My account” page

Set your margins

Cost-plus pricing is the best way to sell virtual stock. Prices change daily – you set a target profit percentage. Create combinations, with an execution order for overlapping rules, e.g. “Acer” “Laptops” “£250 to £500″ – charge 20% markup.

Set prices for individual products.

It is easy to fix prices or set unique margins for individual products, by either manual amendment on the portal, or bulk editing by uploading a table of specific products and prices to be used.

Price by customer

The pricing tool allows you to set pricing by customer group, to ensure your VIP customers always receive preferential pricing over others.

Fully integrated

Pricing rules can be populated via our API from your systems – great for customer-specific rules.

Allow for delivery costs

Set an extra, hidden margin on top of distributors’ prices either as a percentage or fixed amount. This is useful to balance delivery charges for different suppliers.

Set extra margins by supplier

Hidden margins can also be used to favour certain suppliers for your advantage when ordering, e.g. to achieve rebates, post-purchase rewards, avoid higher processing costs, prepayment or simply less-reliable sources. Hidden (absolute or %) margins are added to distributor prices, on top of standard price rules.

How It Works

Our hosted web store offer will give you a live working site in a matter of days selling your suppliers stock. It is based on Magento the worlds leading shopping cart program and can be the basis of a great online business. No technical knowledge is necessary as we do it all for you. However you still have the ability to develop and enhance your store. This page seeks not to repeat all the web store features – so for a full list of features see the main web store page.

Datafeed specification

Self-hosted eCommerce

If you have your own eCommerce platform, you can still populate your online store (or ERP, CRM or PSA system) with a custom catalogue from Stock in the Channel, including pictures, descriptions and specifications.

Our solution

Try out the datafeed

Sample Data

There are two sample data formats offered as standard, a Flat file for easy import or a Multi file for developers. Please feel free to check them out using these credentials below.

Contact us to download our Magento Plugin and test data, It’s free!

For a datafile customised to be optimal for Magento

• Server: ftp://ftp.demo.stockinthechannel.com
• Username: StoreProductsCSV4
• Password: C51406B4

The sample data is updated daily – but the prices and stock and all random.

*Customised file formats can be produced. Other standardised file formats exist – such as for Crown Commercial services technology products frameworks.

Guide to the web store

There are several aspects to setting up a web store including, design and hosting. However this section deals only with our control panel and how to use it.

The control panel allows the following functions.

1. Arrange Categories
2. Manage brands
3. Manage suppliers / feeds
4. Improve descriptions
5. Set profit margins

2 Main Ways To Get Started Selling Online:

• Turnkey solution with Magento. We have plug ins for these packages that allow you get a live site within a few days, although you can fully customize the sites as you wish. If you know Magneto you can run this completely yourself.
• Take our datafeed to populate your own ecommerce software with our stock, prices and product description data. Also for ERP and CRM uses.

We offer sample data and trials so you can try before you buy.

How it works

Our Tool To Manage What You Sell

Stock in the Channel have developed a complete tool to manage the products that are listed on your site.

Broadly this allows you to:

1. Control the margins in your shop
2. Manage the products you sell
3. Set price bands for customer groups
4. Choose which suppliers to include in the shop and if you wish to prejudice against them
5. Create custom categories and move and rename defined categories
6. Choose the brands to include
7. Customise the format of your file to be exported

A Way Of Setting Margins And Pricing

This model deals with virtual stock from your distributors. The lowest priced instance of an item that is in stock in supplier feeds is used as the basis for cost plus margins. (It is possible to prioritise your own stock). You can set a minimum stock threshold to avoid out of stock issues. Distributors with less than the minimum stock threshold will not be included (that means if they have a low price but stock below the threshold, their price will not be included).

The following controls over pricing are possible:

• Costs plus margin by price minimum to price maximum, brand and category. (i.e. Brand: All, Price: £0 to £100, Category: Laptops)
• Multiple rules can be set up with an execution order. If more than one rule applies to a product the rule to be executed last applies. You can set the order.
• Manual pricing in actual £s or a manual margin can be set up.
• You can set hidden margins on distributor prices to prejudice against them – these can be either a fixed amount or an extra percentage – these extra margins are applied before the price rules are applied.
• You can set price bands per customer – as percentages – on top of the price list prices, so Jim could pay an extra 10% and John an extra 5% – A common requirement is to produce your main price bands – typically gold, silver and bronze, and then override these prices with specific set prices for the haggle products by customer.
• In your ecommerce software you may have the ability to set margins in addition to the above – by customer or overall.

Product Descriptions And Content

Stock in the Channel has over 1.4m product descriptions – including images and specifications.

In our feeds we include product descriptions provided by Icecat, descriptions provided by distributors and user and third party reviews provided by TestSeek – all matched with the products from your suppliers and your own stock.

Icecat is a content subscription service that typically retails for 300 euros per month for its full catalogue. They also have an Open model that is free. The free open product descriptions cover about 60% of products, the full subscription increases this to 72%.

With our service everyone gets all of the category and attribute information from the premium subscription plus links to datasheets we host (branded for your company) containing the premium content. These datasheets can be included in an iframe to appear on your site.

If you pay for the full subscription you get the actual data rather than the iframe for the products that are only available on the full subscription. Cnet is also being offered at £75 per month that will provide a back fill for open Icecat products via the provision of their full product descriptions.

The following information is provided:

• Manufacturer’s Name / Part Number
• Product Name
• EAN code (if available)
• Category of product (e.g. Category computers, subcategory laptop)
• A link to a datasheet that we host which contains an all the product information – to which you can add your own style sheet.
• Total stock level from the distributors that you buy from
• Lowest price of the product from the distributors that you buy from and that have stock
• Name of the lowest cost distributor
• Links to images of the product
• Your sell price for the product (according to the rules you have set up)
• A separate file containing stock and prices from each separate distributor supplying the product
• Detailed product description
• Full product specifications
• Images – including a range of thumbnails, larger and high resolution. Some products have multiple images – up to 40 in some cases
• Product attributes (e.g. memory – 2GB)
• A list of related products
• User and Expert reviews of the products

Improving Product Descriptions

Over 1.1m product descriptions are provided. However that still leaves hundreds of thousands of products without descriptions. Particularly parts and obscure products are without descriptions. However to allow you to effectively sell these products we have developed tools to improve product descriptions in bulk. To begin, you search our site using any criteria available until you have the required list of products in front of you then:

• Select one or more of the products and bulk edit. This is a one of action.
• Create rule, this does similar things to the bulk edit except that the rules run automatically everynight.

This will allow you to set the images for the product and the descriptions, copy or move the product in to a category, set the weight of the products, stock level, status, profit margin, product status and more. These rules are great for getting your products listed on shopping channels, for search engine optimization and fundamentally so you have better display on your web site.

Category Trees

Our main categorisation is from Icecat – which is great for the IT industry. You can create your own custom categories. Your site can include multiple category trees. Additionally we offer:

• A toner finder – using data sourced from Bechlem and covering 31,000 printers. Compatible brands are included and your own compatible brand can be added. You are able to choose which compatible Brand(s) to sell.
• Office products solutions, Vow, Spicers, Azerty and others can be offered. For example with Vow we import all their products, using their own descriptions / images, plus Icecat and optionally Cnet. BOSS Federation categories are used to navigate.
• Custom categorisation, your own category structure can be uploaded to our system.

Stock Management

Stock from your distributor’s (virtual stock) feeds into the web store at least once a day. You can add your own stock (and other supplier’s products) too by providing an FTP location where our system can go to and retrieve the file. So fundamentally you should have no issues with out of stock items.

At most we can update the feed hourly so you can update stock changes. If you need real time data, a web service is offered that allows you to initiate real time queries of stock availability, however this only covers some of the suppliers as not all suppliers offer real time stock checks.

The Ability To Add Your Own Stock & Private Suppliers

In addition to the 90 plus supported distributors you can add your own stock or other suppliers who are not already included. In this way the site gives you a complete view of the products you are able to source. Some of our customers include up to 80 private suppliers. All products are matched with product descriptions if available, products are updated via a manual upload – or by you setting up a task that puts the up to date product list at an FTP location – where our server can log in and collect it.

Private datafeeds have two rules that you can apply :

• Prioritise this feed – this means all other suppliers of the same products will be ignored
• Do not apply pricing rules – this means you can put strategic sales prices in your feed

All The Product Data/Prices In A Spreadsheet

This is the information that populates your webstore. It is available in two different formats for you to download – import it to your ERP or CRM or export it to other sales channels. It is updated every day although there are hourly options available.

Choose One Of Our Two File Formats.

Simple flat file

One flat file – with your choice or delimiters and columns to include.

✓ POSITIVES – Easy to import into any application with limited technical knowledge.

✘ NEGATIVES – Not as robust as the relational database and slightly less information

Download a Sample in the Flat File format http://www.stockinthechannel.com/samples/productsfullexport.csv

11 table relational database

A set of interrelated tables using ids.

✓ POSITIVES – Robust and reliable with the full range of information.

✘ NEGATIVES – You need to be a developer to import this file.

Completely Automated

Every night our system will go out to the suppliers and automatically collect your feeds. The data is imported and normalised, then matched with the product descriptions. Price and data quality rules are applied and then a file is published which you can import in to your web store.

Add Your Own Suppliers / Stock

In addition to the suppliers we show on our site you can add unlimited other suppliers / stock and price feeds. To do this you need at least stock, price, SKU and brand in a spreadsheet. This process can be done manually by uploading a file or can be automated with our system collecting files from an FTP location

Real Time Stock And Prices

Out of the 200 suppliers we have on board about 20% allow real time queries of stock and price levels so you can see completely accurate information from them. (With the other suppliers we update hourly).

Electronic Ordering

Over 25 suppliers are fully integrated between their systems and ours– this involves the following:

• Sending electronic purchase orders to get the suppliers to drop ship the goods
• Receiving an order status and tracking reports as the supplier fulfills the orders
• Receiving the supplier invoices for the products ordered

Getting Suppliers Set Up

For most of the UK distributors you simply have to enter your account number and click apply for prices on a web page within our site. It is completely simple to get working:

1. In other countries and with new suppliers to add new suppliers send us the supplier stock file and we will put it live for you straight away – or add the supplier as a private datafeed.
2. To set up suppliers for Real time queries and ordering, contact our sales team

Let us know if we missed anything…