MarketSite Africa - Africa's premier business-to-business e-marketplace - has launched a new service that makes it easier for suppliers to create interactive catalogues for their buyers which are then hosted on the MarketSite Africa (MSA) eMarketplace.
An eMarketplace supports complex business processes online, resulting in greater efficiencies and cost savings for all participants through a number of services.
At MarketSite Africa one of these processes that is offered as a service is the routing and distribution of purchase orders from buyers to the relevant suppliers. However, suppliers have traditionally struggled to maintain their catalogues in an online format.
MarketSite Africa has launched a new service, known as Catalogue Publisher (CP), which provides suppliers with an easy-to-use suite of tools to upload their catalogue content and have it validated and published to MarketSite Africa buyers via the Web. Once the catalogue has been built, the supplier is able to export that catalogue to other e-marketplaces as well.
Create e-commerce catalogues
Loading catalogues to Internet-based e-marketplaces has been a hurdle for companies wishing to trade online. Christine Thomson, director of supplier enablement and vendor management at MarketSite Africa, says that with CP a supplier can create e-commerce catalogues more cost-effectively and with more control.
She explains that a supplier can now submit catalogue content, price and image files to the Catalogue Publisher via Catalogue Upload and CP will carry out the validation of the data. The classification of products is done by the supplier -- or the supplier can continue to use a content refinery to do the classification and then upload the catalogue data.
"Once the file has been accepted for processing, the supplier may view the job status using the Catalogue Tracker. A supplier has the ability to check on the progress of their catalogue as it moves through Catalogue Publisher, and buyers can download the catalogues from the e-marketplace. The Catalogue Viewer allows a supplier to view content, in the same way that buyers see it once the catalogue is complete," she adds.
MarketSite Africa is providing support and training on this new service.
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