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Cantrex Group teams up with Tailbase Retail Services

Providing furniture dealers with Web services

Michael Knell -- Furniture Today, November 6, 2009

MONTREAL — Cantrex Group has entered into an exclusive agreement with Tailbase Retail Services to provide its members with tools to make them more competitive in the emerging electronic marketplace.

"This strategic alliance with Tailbase takes the value of a Cantrex membership to an even higher level," said Alain Masse, Cantrex's president and general manager. "We can now offer even the smallest retailers an affordable, professional Web presence with access to a huge, content-rich e-catalog and unique competitive information. These new e-tools will empower our group of independent retailers in ways not possible before."

Cantrex's package of new e-services includes:

• Free access to a bilingual e-catalog with detailed product specifications and photographs for thousands of furniture, appliance, bedding, consumer electronics and photography brands.

• Affordable Web site creation and hosting.

• Easy addition of products to existing Web sites.

• Full e-commerce Web sites for online selling.

• "Strategic Watch," a customizable report that displays competitive ads and promotions as they appear in the press.

• Dynamic pricing capability -- the automatic updating of Web site prices based on competitive data.

"This alliance with Tailbase takes us one step closer to achieving our e-Cantrex vision," said Sylvain Casabon, Cantrex's vice-president for information systems. "We are also working on projects to integrate our back-end systems with these e-services, to automate administrative tasks for our retailers and suppliers."

Tailbase is a newly established subsidiary of Datatail, a Montreal-based Web development and retail tracking service specializing in consumer electronics, automotive electronics and computers.

"We selected Tailbase as a strategic partner because of their leading-edge Web design, rich bilingual catalog content and market knowledge," said Casabon. "Tailbase's can-do team spirit contributed greatly to our choosing them as a partner in providing this new generation of services to our membership."

Mark Melanson, Cantrex's vice president of retail services, noted that the new Tailbase system will cover all of the group's major product categories.

"The big advantage for our members will be the database, which will include all of the SKUs and specifications for all products," he said. "This catalog will be updated daily."

The dynamic pricing option will allow members to track competitors' promotions and advertising in something very close to real time and then adjust their own pricing automatically. Individual members will control the pricing rules, but the process will become automatic after that.

Tailbase's "Strategic Watch" service gathers up fliers and other advertising materials across the country and updates pricing on a daily basis. Cantrex members will be able to review these materials simply by logging on to Tailbase's Web site.

The service also will allow Cantrex members who do not currently have their own Web site to get online for as little as $500. Melanson said Tailbase has designed an easy-to-use template that members can adapt without a lot of effort.

Tailbase's new Web site is expected to be online sometime over the next few weeks.

"This is going to be a great tool for our members and it will be easy to use," Melanson said. "It will save a lot of time and make Web management much easier."

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