The Dialog Corp. PLC
launched Planet Retail, an Internet-based
comparative shopping service for consumers, and said it is planning a
business-to-business e-commerce operation.
Dialog is a provider of online information, and has service and technology
strengths in electronic data indexing, searching, retrieval and alerting
systems.
“E-commerce is an ideal complement to our online information services and
represents an unrivalled business opportunity,” said Dan Wagner, CEO of
Dialog. “With our experience of delivering services over the Internet, and
through the application of
our proprietary searching and indexing technologies, Dialog is uniquely
placed to advance the trend in both the business-to-business and consumer
e-commerce markets.”
The company explained that in the first phase of the Planet Retail service,
in partnership with Junglee Corp.,
users are able to search the Internet through Planet Retail’s interface to
determine the best available online prices from approximately 100 Internet
retailers in 11 main categories, from books to clothing to electronic
products.
Initial participants in this phase, which will be entirely sponsored by
advertising include Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, CD Now, Dell
Computers, Eddie
Bauer, FAO Schwarz, Gateway2000, JC Penney, Land’s End, Music Boulevard, The Gap, Wal-Mart, Disney, Office Depot and Office Max.
The second phase of Planet Retail will add the capability for consumers to
make purchases with a broad range of retailers directly from the Planet Retail
site. Planet Retail said it will provide confirmation receipts from all
retailers and total the expenditures from within the service, relieving
users from entering
credit card information for each retailer.
The second phase also will incorporate Dialog’s InfoSort data indexing
technology, designed to enable users to browse product reviews, company
profiles, relevant news and research.
In the business-to-business market, the company said it is developing a
solution for purchasing managers in small, medium and large organizations. Due
to be released in 1999, this solution will provide a purchase management
system to reside on corporate intranets.
Dialog is a provider of online information created by the merger of M.A.I.D
PLC., and Knight-Ridder Information Inc. with world headquarters in London
and U.S.
headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
