With the recent decline and eventual demise of all retail techology shows in the UK, there is a question over how potential buyers find potential suppliers. Of course the simple internet search using Google is the obvious answer and it is probably the success of internet search which has caused the afforementioned demise. Searches of the whole internet though, tend to bring back a pretty mixed bag of results and you would need to try several search terms to get a reasonable list. It would also not be possible to filter the results by companies based in the UK, or those supplying systems using Microsoft technology, for example.
In reponse to this problem, a couple of new directories have sprung up. The first is On Windows. This is managed by Tudor Rose who publish Retail Speak and is for Microsoft partners only. This type of information is also on the microsoft.com but if you are looking for a specialist retail systems, the On Windows site is much easier.
Secondly Conjungo is providing supplier search service for all types of system across all industries. Retail Technology magazine is planning to link to this engine in the near future.
The limitations of this type of directory are that they only list suppliers who have paid to be listed and those suppliers get to write their own entry. It is therefore very hard to get a view on the quality of the suppliers and you will only see those who have paid to be on the directory. Of course this is also true of internet searches – suppliers write their own websites and only those who invest in SEO will do well in the searches. However, for the technology buyer these developments can only be good news. Suppliers will need to think carefully about how they spend their marketing budgets.
May 16, 2009 at 4:09 pm |
Hi Thanks for the comments. Just to ’set the record straight’, Conjungo has some 14,500 channel partners listed in the directory. Premiere listings are input by the various vendors e.g. Cisco, Citrix etc. who validate and pay for the upgrades. This ensures that companies can only claim to have the correct accreditations if they have been approved by a vendor. To be listed costs absolutely nothing and those free listings will still be found in the search results. These results are returned on a random basis in order to ensure a level playing field i.e we wanted to avoid the ‘Yellow Pages’ scenario whereby companies would be listed as AAAAAArdvaark & Co to be seen at the tope of the list. If you search against the same criteria multiple times, you will always see different companies being listed. This, we believe is a fair and balanced method. While I take on board your comment about it being difficult to know whether or not a particular company is good or not, the point about Conjungo is to give choice and we always suggest that a potential purchaser of technology speaks with at least 3 to 4 different companies. Furthermore, this is backed up by the fact that a user can get a credit report on potential suppliers quickly and easily within each company profile, in order to ensure that a company is in good financial shape before placing an order.
I hope that this helps! Feel free to contact me if you have any further questions. Kind regards, Ben