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.

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).

Your Own Stock & Services

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.

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.