ec-Content, Inc. announced the availability of its MRO content library, and content acquisition, management and maintenance offerings for B2B Net marketplaces, and introduced its Supplier Neutral Content methodology for managing and maintaining value-added content. A provider of comprehensive MRO content with a management and maintenance solution, ec-Content partners with Net marketplaces looking to increase the effectiveness of their online catalogs to attract and retain more buyers. Because no two suppliers, manufacturers or wholesalers collect, maintain and present content in exactly the same way, buyers often find there are many sources for price and product information coming from a single manufacturer or supplier, making it difficult to locate and purchase items. The acquisition and maintenance of electronic catalog content, and the ability to offer item cross-referencing are daunting tasks that require marketplaces to aggregate hundreds of thousands of items with different attributes, from different catalogs. ec-Content removes the burden of these tasks by providing Net marketplaces with access to a centralized content library of 5.2 million items, supporting tens of millions of SKUs, across 40,000 suppliers that can be customized to reflect buyers’ negotiated prices for each supplier. The complex MRO content is cleaned, normalized and standardized, then maintained on a scalable database. By outsourcing content management to ec-Content, buying organizations eliminate the need to track their purchases through hundreds of paper catalogs containing items with different attributes and often outdated pricing. ec-Content’s value-added content includes enhanced product descriptions, images, common identifiers, and current pricing information updated on a regularly scheduled basis. In addition, ec-Content provides quality assurance services including the ongoing tracking of anomalies, discontinued items and pricing changes, that improve Net marketplace content and in turn, makes the marketplace more valuable to its customers. To effectively manage the electronic catalog content needed by Net marketplaces, ec-Content assigns a universal number to each item in their database, and maps that identifier to corresponding supplier part numbers and commodity codes. The solution behind ec-Content’s Supplier Neutral Content is the Content Overlay Process that essentially overlays supplier catalogs that include varying descriptions for identical products. This eliminates the need for Net marketplaces to input multiple product descriptions from multiples suppliers, establishing a scalable process for managing and maintaining customized catalogs. www.eccontent.com