This enhancement is in response to a growing industry demand for increased granularity (breakdowns under major headings) within the Trade Service electrical commodity code hierarchy. This revision supports a distributor’s need to more closely align product categories with their respective pricing groups as well as offer on-line customers a more precise path to locate a specific item in their Internet catalog.

The commodity code was originally designed to sort groups of like items across manufacturers to help distributors perform various types of analysis or reporting, such as “profit by product category”, etc. Today, distributors use these codes to organize their items into the same or similar pricing groups as used by their manufacturers allowing them to set up customer discounts by product category. For example, a distributor can give a customer a percentage discount off all “limit switches” he buys, given his purchasing volume of this product category. Now, with the newly enhanced commodity codes, the distributor can set up one discount for "limit switches", and additional special discounts which distinguish between general, medium, heavy, and severe duty limit switches.

In another use model, distributors who host Internet storefronts need an effective category tree structure that gives their customers the ability to “drill down” to a specific item in their catalog. The additional granularity afforded by the enhanced commodity codes now makes it possible for distributors to further refine this process and substantially improve searching results.

“We plan to gradually implement this new structure over the next 12 to 18 months, through our regular database updating activity,” states Mike Podoris, Product Manager for the Trade Service database. “We believe this new structure will be well-received by our customers as it will provide a significantly wider range of commodity code usage within their business applications."

About Trade Service
Trade Service Corporation is the leading provider of standardized product and price information to the electrical, plumbing/PVF, HVACR, industrial MRO, and office products industries. Since 1931, the company has been the leader in content acquisition, aggregation, management, publishing, and distribution, offering a variety of products, services, and systems to meet the content needs of over 20,000 distributors, contractors, government agencies and “buy side” Fortune 1000 subscribers. The range of solutions provided includes printed directories, electronic catalogs, pricing data for business system updating, and robust attributed content to fuel full-functioning Internet storefronts. For more information, visit www.tradeservice.com.