VARCentral portal puts power in the hands of resellers

Smaller technology resellers would have the opportunity to develop an ecommerce presence on the cheap following the launch of a new service this week. 

VARCentral was the product of an eight-month project with ecommerce systems specialists eCorner to build a portal of market data including prices from technology distributors. 

VARCentral business development manager Stuart Whitmore said it enabled resellers to access the portal for a monthly fee of $220.

“Smaller resellers would be looking at 10s of thousands of dollars to do this on their own," Whitmore said.

VARCentral would offer services such as finance and payment gateways PayPal and Australian service eWay. 

He said it allowed customisation with resellers choosing website templates with different livery. And it had business intelligence tools such as Wagtail Analytics to follow traffic, sales and other data. Resellers could track monthly annuities and licence renewal dates while the provided quote tool would help them to seal deals.

“This is aimed at giving smaller and medium sized resellers a low-cost multimedia ecommerce platform allowing them to do more business online,” Whitmore said.

VARCentral was powered by global online store provider ePages which had more than 50,000 merchants worldwide. 

Subscribers had access to prices and special offers from distributors in Australia such as Ingram Micro, Synnex, Dicker Data, Simms and Alloy as well as New Zealand distributors Exceed and Dove Data Products. They would also have access to resources for marketing, group discounts and other deals.

Whitmore said it was not VARCentral’s intention to creative competitive pressures for distributors; it hoped to inform resellers of their price and other business activities broadcast through disties' RSS feeds.

“Most resellers don’t have bandwidth to deal with more than two disties,” he said.

“And many distie products lines are often quite complementary.” 

VARCentral was not talking to distributors but Whitmore was confident they would benefit by being exposed to more resellers.

It has signed Australian reseller IT Logic and IT Express in New Zealand would have hundreds of resellers by the end of the year, he said.