Building Vine™ is so much more than a product database, as a recent submission of data by Boiler manufacturer and supplier Glow worm demonstrates – a screen shot of their excellent dataset is shown below:
What’s so special?
In the real world, every product has attributes. For paint manufacturers their product attributes are something similar to “colour”, “finish”, and “size in litres”. For Glow worm and other boiler manufacturers, their attributes are similar to “output”, “flow rate”, “SEBUK rating”, “condensing output” etc.
Just these two examples highlight just how different suppliers products are; add in other 100,000 products from shower valves to plasterboard, from cement through to door handles – and you start to get an idea of why a simple “product database” doesn’t cut it. You either need to limit the attributes to a pre-defined set of “columns”, or you try to accommodate every attribute as a column in your product database and end up with an administrative nightmare – a spreadsheet with thousands of columns.
When we started creating Building Vine™, we were adamant that we shouldn’t restrict suppliers to conform to our “dataset”; which would make updating their data time consuming and highly restrictive.
However, we were also mindful that Merchants want to import suppliers data directly into their back office systems.
We are proud that we have achieved both of these things: suppliers are free to have as many “attributes” as they wish, without compromising Merchants ability to import supplier data into their back office system.
Maximum value, zero effort
Merchants who have a premium Building Vine subscription get any data changes sent to them nightly, in a format that can be imported directly into their ERM system without any formatting required. They can also display product data such as in the screenshot above directly in their ecommerce website by adding 2 lines of code to their website.
All Building Vine™ users can search and retrieve this information in the Building Vine™ website, and Building Vine™ partners CEMCO, have access to all this product data directly within their group intranet.
If you’re curious to see what you’re missing, signup for a free Building Vine™ account now.
