The distributors are so keen to get the information out there now that
they provide it in various formats, csv, xml and so on so that you can
pull it straight into a DB and power your webstore! All you needt do
is work out your % markup and your pretty much in business. Its almost
like most of these companies are affiliates for the distributors
rather than stores in the true sense. Of course its not entirely that
simple as I am sure they will buy some stuff in bulk to get a better
price, and of course they probably all use more than one distributor
so they need to pull all that data together and make it work.

Somewhere in there they probably add a bit of customer support too,
though i dont have any conclyusive proof of that bit! :-)



On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 23:24:08 -0000, "Jeremiah Harbottle"
wrote:



Argh, EDI! I had to write some software once to convert that stuff into
database data - but in true "standard" form it was all different..
(Used XML stylesheets in the end.)