Member Benefiits - SAAC Partners An Interview with Tiffany Tarr By Bob Levitt With SAAC’s continuing effort to profile our Partners, we recently interviewed Tiffany Tarr, Vice President, Sale for business service provider, Distributor Central.
Bob Levitt
Brief overview of DC, history, vision DistributorCentral started in 1999. DC was started out of necessity. Suppliers were starting to realize they needed an e-commerce website and that their Distributor partners also needed a website solution that allowed their end buyer customers to also purchase products. We were started by a supplier who envisioned 100% of his Distributor customers could find his products through a search solution that was free, and those distributors could also build e-commerce websites featuring suppliers’ products at no cost. That is really the core of our business, providing technology that allows the Suppliers and Distributors to sell more products faster. Why Distributors should use you with so many options available DistributorCentral’s foundation is to provide distributors a free solution to source products from this industry. We are the only solution out there that is providing website solutions and hosting still at zero cost to the distributor. Our products data is built on the foundation that every products is accurate, we want to eliminate the need to call a suppliers office to verify pricing in a search solution. What type of Distributor is your ideal prospect? Every distributor is an ideal prospect. We have large distributors who are using our website or research solution all the way to an independent business owner who is launching their promotional products business.
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Tiffany Tarr, Distributor Central
Why suppliers should use you, etc. Suppliers that should list their products in DC are suppliers who want to simplify the way they do business. These suppliers are looking for ways to reduce their internal customer service cost, reduce the number of places they are trying to maintain product information, and get their products in front of more buyers. Ideal supplier type? Because we believe that we do not own suppliers product data, we give suppliers full control of each aspect of their data. They can update product information and it will automatically update 15,000 distributor websites in real time. Our ideal supplier understands this and understands how important it is that their product information is accurate and orderable. How do you stay relevant? We are making technology changes all of the time. We have opened up our product database, so that other service providers can use the product data. This is important because we want to help suppliers get their product data into as many places as they need. We don’t own supplies product data, the suppliers do, and if they need the data exported and usable for another solution, we want
Member Benefiits - SAAC Partners to do that for them. This is a different approach over other industry service providers. We also listen to our suppliers and distributor customers. If there is something that they need and they think it will help them sell more, we want to look at that and find out if it is within our abilities add into DC. A lot of new technology that we are launching now is because a customer said they needed it and it would help them sell more products. DC also operates lean, which allows us to make necessary changes as the business requires a change.
Why do you support SAAC? I love the regional associations, and believe in them. The show was great, well attended and it provided us a means to reach more people on the west coast. We never could have meet with as many distributors and suppliers as we did by just making a trip to California. The show was cost effective in relation to the number of people we were able to make a connections with, and do business with.
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