Electronic product information is becoming more and more important and as each year passes it becomes the staple diet of websites, brochures and pricelists. If you do not want to be an also-ran in the competitive motorcycle retail environment then you have to be able to supply a lot of product information very quickly and accurately. Your customers, your customers' customers and your customers' customers' customers will all require electronic information about your products and you are the best people to supply that information. By using the Motorcycle Product Index you can ensure that the same consistent quality sales message ends up with the consumer so that they know exactly what they need to know to make that decision to buy your products. Your product information will be used by your customers to help them sell your products so it is imperative you make it accessible in the right places, one of which will be here. Your customers will already intuitively tend to favour suppliers who provide accurate information. If you do not have that information in the Index you will make it much more difficult for your customers to collate information about your products and therefore much easier for your customers to sell your competitors products.

WHY YOU SHOULD USE THIS SERVICE

General:

• Lack of information loses sales, plain and simple. Therefore by increasing the accuracy and quality of your product information in as many places as possible you can help to maximise sales.
• The Motorcycle Product Index is dedicated to being the most comprehensive and useful site for anyone looking to buy motorcycle products. We cover more brands in more categories for more motorcycles than any other product based website. Therefore we are the obvious choice to find out about any product and consumers and business users will naturally use us as a primary information source, and can point users to your products.

To Help Yourself:

• We provide an instant conduit for your products to hundreds of customers and thousands of consumers.
• We can ensures that you are always 'in-the-frame' especially from people who had not previously considered or know about you.
• We are the easiest and fastest method to communicate product details to your customers around the globe.
• You can change your product information in one place and your customers are instantly notified.
• No more constant re-distribution of CDs and price lists which are generally out of date when issued.
We enable you to offer a consistent, comprehensive and bang up to date resource for all your existing and potential customers.
• If consumers do not know about you now then they will do once you are a member as we will email all interested in your types of product.

To Help Your Dealers:

• Your product information and pricing is available immediately in their portfolios. They do not need to go off to your website and trawl around trying to find information.
• You can bet your bottom dollar that even if your product details are on your website or on a supplied CD that it will be time consuming for your customers to make use of that data.
• Easy for them to transfer your new and updated information to their portfolios with just one or two clicks.
• Much quicker and simpler for them to get your information in a format usable to them. This increases their likelihood to promote more of your products accurately to their customers both instore and via the web..
• They can check your stock in one place and avoids phone calls and checking multiple websites.
• If you create the core details for your products, distributors and retailers can spend more time enhancing that information themselves rather than struggling to source and make it usable it in the first place.

To Help Consumers:

• If your information is in the Motorcycle Product Index it will more easily find it's way to more consumers faster, enabling them to understand your products much better.
• Failure to provide information puts the onus on your distributors and retailers meaning higher risk of product abandonment.
• You can ensure that consumers are receiving all the information they need to know aboout your products, without it being diluted.

You may already point customers to your website for information about your products but when they have to do that for all their suppliers it really multiplies their workload. Your customers want one place to find the information they need in a consistent format for all their suppliers - why make their life difficult and give them a reason to use someone else?

The Motorcycle Product Index will help you speed up the process of supplying information and reduce the cost of distributing electronic product data. You will only need to supply the information to one place, Motorcycle Product Index, and your customers will then be able to get what they need themselves in a format they like.

How quickly can you provide this? Would you not like this information at your fingertips? Or better still for them to be able to answer the question themselves without having to contact you.

The Motorcycle Product Index will help you both speed up this process and enable you to provide more authoritative information in a fraction of the time it currently takes you. You will also be able to offer alternatives (where possible) and provide comparative information to enable informed decisions and preventing potential customers going away to 'think about it'.

For manufacturers the Motorcycle Product Index can be used as follows.

1. Creation of your product portfolio.

This will be a very easy task. You will be able to enter and update your products either directly through a screen or by uploading a spreadsheet of the data. Your products are then available for use by your customers.

2. Allow and restrict access to your product protfolio.

Access to your portfolio is restricted by default. Other motorcycle traders will be able to see what products you provide and will then need to request access to the information. Once you grant this permission they can then add your products into their portfolio. All sensitive data can only be viewed if you have granted permission so there is no fear of pricing information getting into the wrong hands.

3. Download of product data

You will be able to select either all or a selection of products from your portfolio and then choose which information about those you wish to download. This information is then put into a Excel formatted spreadsheet where you can easily manipulate the data for your use in your E-Commerce systems or for price lists and brochures or to supply to customers who do not subscribe to the Motorcycle Product Index. At a later stage there will be an option to directly supply this data to your E-Commerce system via XML Web Services.

4. Accessing Product Information

As the Motorcycle Product Index will become the industry's central source of product reference information you need to ensure your information is as complete as possible in our index. Your customers and potential customers will become familiar in using the index to find products to buy and sell.

5. Broadcasting New Product Releases

If you have a new product then you can broadcast this fact to all your subscribed customers. This will make them instantly aware of the new product and they can then quickly add it to their portfolio ensuring that it gets to market in the shortest possible time. You can also use this facility to make any public announcements, news, warnings or recalls receive as much exposure globally as possible by adding it into just one channel.

6. Primary Product Promotion

Ensure that your products are right in front of your distributors and retailers when they are searching the Motorcycle Product Index by advertising on specific category pages.

The Beta version of the consumer site is now available with restricted functionality but not currently showing products. These will be listed soon enabling the general public to access product information. They will be able to narrow down their preferences for products until they find exactly the product they are looking for. There will then be a list of retailers presented on screen for them which have these products in their product portfolio. For them to choose your products they must be in the retailers portfolio and to be in the retailers portfolio they must be in the distributors portfolio which means they must be in the manufacturers portfolio too. It has never been more important for you to provide this information if you are to help those above you in the supply chain.

To get a real head start you need to register now and encourage your customers to join too, as after all their portfolios will reflect yours and this will be the simplest way to get your products in front of as many consumers as possible. It really is a case of working together to make light work of some very complex data issues.