There are a number of companies which provide services to retailers listing products on the shopping comparison engines. Channel Intelligence does this and a lot more. Here’s a write up of my call with Rob Wight of Channel Intelligence…
Briefly, what is Channel Intelligence?
“We provide commerce data services to manufacturers, dealers, and affiliates to make it easy for them to get a user from looking at a product to buying a product. We are a data based company that provides information to make the process of ecommerce easy and successful for dealers, manufacturers, and affiliates.”
You provide a lot of different services to clients, but how do you work with manufacturers, dealers, and affiliates on the shopping comparison engine front?
“We have varying relationships with all our partners. We have paying clients in all three categories, but not all relationships are paying.”
We work with hundreds of Manufacturers (defined as the original creator of product)…
“We help manufacturers list the dealers (online and brick and mortar) that have their product in stock and are able to sell it right now. We link manufacturer product pages to the product pages of the online resellers based on who the manufacturer chooses. For brick and mortar dealers, we list dealers that have product in stock right now so the consumer can go directly to the stores to buy it. We receive a daily feed of inventory information (both for online products and local inventory for the dealers).”
We work with thousands of Dealers (defined as reseller of a product)…
“We provide dealers with services to syndicate their commerce content out to shopping engines and other affiliates so their products are effectively listed on affiliate sites. This involves either getting the products into unified listings or in the non-unified product pages.”
We work with dozens and dozens of Affiliates (defined as intermediaries – any one of a variety of different sites that aren’t dealers or manufacturers)…
“Affiliates can be shopping engines, but also other types of aggregators such as large portals, specialty content sites, Amazon, eBay, search engines, etc. We customize the outbound syndication feed for effectiveness within the particular affiliate. What we send to a search engine is different than what we send to a unified page on a shopping comparison engine.”
“We also provide affiliates with back end data services to help them unify products, help them categorize and have as effective a commerce site as possible. With some affiliates, we provide them with feeds detailing local availability of products, with others, we provide categorization of products.”
“We’re a massive data aggregator. Circuit City will tell us to syndicate out their data. HP will tell us to create links out to dealers. An affiliate will ask us to provide local shopping information.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Brian Smith 
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