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.

With over 20 suppliers now in the system, and over 5000 product images and product data – the system is starting to get some bulk.

To help build the data set, we’re offering Building Vine™ as a free trial for Suppliers and Manufacturers until Jan 2011.

To join and start adding your data, simply visit the Building Vine™ website and sign-up for free now.

The conference is over two days – and this is the first conference (for Lightside) with the second Heavyside conference in March.

So far, we have about 20 suppliers keen to get going, so within the next few weeks we should hopefully start to get images, product data and asset files loaded into the system for use.

I’ll report back after the conference has completely finished to give a complete low down and overview.

Tom.

This is in an effort to serve even more people and construction firms, allowing us to gain even more knowledge and synergy in the industry.

We’ll still be operating in the UK of course, with our UK office still based in Staines in Middlesex.

You can call us on our US number: +1 (302) 450-1433 or email us@ebiz.co.uk for more information.