Consolidating information from multiple pages and microsites onto a single page for ease of use, and a major improvement to the search engine highlight the changes to the site, which will be available to most partners later this year.
Chip Evans, President of Vienna VA-based solution provider Computerware, and Varnex Advisory Council member
ATLANTA – On the first day of its Varnex conference here for its premier SMB-focused partner community, distributor Synnex announced that it has upgraded its ECExpress platform for North America.
“They weren’t getting many complaints about the old portal, but were just trying to find ways to enhance it,” said Chip Evans, SYNNEX Varnex Advisory Council member who is President of Vienna VA-based solution provider Computerware. “It is a major rewrite, however.”
Evans indicated SYNNEX first polled the customer base beforehand to get ideas about the kind of changes that were wanted, and that they later invited the Advisory Council to look at it once they had something to show. The overarching theme of the refresh was to make finding information simpler than it has been before.
“Most of the information you use on a daily basis is on the front page,” he said. “Before you had to hop around, although it was easy to navigate.”
Evans said that the order page has also been redone so everything can be placed all on one page rather than on multiple pages for the different microsites of the various Technology Solutions platforms. Ordering from the unified shopping cart makes it easier for a reseller to more easily review an order.
“Before, if you had orders for products, services and licensing you had to go to three different pages, and now it’s all done in the same place,” Evans said. “That’s a big help.”
Another example of consolidation is that the site now lets a partner confirm order status and find out product availability and the SYNNEX warehouse from which products would ship, all from the home page, something Evans could be done before, but not in such a unified way.
The new dashboard on the ECExpress home page lets SYNNEX partners check inventory and prices with a single click, with enhanced search engine optimization to make keyword searches more accurate.
“With the previous search engine, it was difficult to narrow down, with the result being that none of our reps used it,” Evans said. “They have now fixed that.”
One new feature is the ability to manage vendor product promotions and multiple incentive programs from one location through SYNNEX’s PROMOCentral promotional management platform.
“That’s a new feature, to see manufacturer promos without having to go to a separate website,” Evans said.
Mitchell Martin, President of SYNNEX Canada, said the rollout schedule for ECExpress 7.0 will be basically the same in Canada as in the U.S. A select group of power users will get access in May. The broader base of partners will get access at some point later in the year.
“There are a few changes to handle the different currency and taxes, but for the most part, it’s the same product,” Martin said
