Channel integration for online storefronts

We first starting thinking about what would later become our ChannelCart product in late 2004. We had already enjoyed some successful high-profile deployments of our Glue framework but we were starting to hear this new phrase – "channel conflict."

It turns out that the front line of this conflict was right in our backyard in Atlanta. The Home Depot had decreed that any manufacturer who sold their own products directly on their own Website would risk getting pulled from Home Depot retail shelves. And even though the ipi.net team has always been among the biggest fanboys (and fangirls) of all things Web, we knew that only a sucker would trade 95% of their sales at retail for the less-than-5% they might get online. So we rebuilt some core parts of Glue and optimized the way we extract and adapt data so that the system would pay particular attention to bits that looked like a price, a trademark, a product name, a product photo or a product description. We thought the approach was pretty unique, and the US Patent Office agreed in summer of 2009, by issuing us US Patent # 7,546,290.

ChannelCart™ delivered an instant online store to the world's #2 micro-processor company by aggregating everything their top 100 channel partners sold on their own ecommerce sites around the world.

But we weren't exactly standing around for the patent to issue after we first filed it back in 2005. Instead, we built a worldwide online storefront for the #2 global microprocessor company and pointed ChannelCart at the standalone Websites of more than 100 of their premier resellers. Each day, ChannelCart would detect and store more than 150,000 data points representing current specs, prices and special offers on products these partners offered for sale. Our client would then analyze this data for competitive intelligence and filter their own products out for their storefront, still open for business.

The end result? Buyers could find any product they wanted on the manufacturer's site (right where they typically do their pre-sale research) and then click a "Buy Now" button that would take them straight to the partner site offering the product for sale. Our system moved tens of millions of dollars in channel sales for the three years it was live before ipi.net resigned the business to a more commodity data provider (a.k.a., a body shop doing manual data entry overseas) so that our founder could spend a few years launching a TV-on-the-Internet service called TIOTI.

ChannelCart: Overview

This graphic is part of a full ChannelCart brochure, available to download in PDF form in the right column of this page.