Benefits

• Online retailers and others can easily present consumers with product information from the manufacturer's server, vastly improving the shopping experience to increase sales while dramatically reducing site creation and maintenance costs.
  
  
• Consumers can use the product codes to directly access product support information directly from manufacturers.
  
  
• Each Manufacturer need only create and maintain one master copy of product information on a single server of its choice, vastly simplifying the task of distributing  complete, up-to-date and accurate product and company data.  All manufacturers, small and large, can easily and inexpensively make their product information globally available at the time of sale through all participating resellers.
  
  
• Distributors and resellers can use product codes from their existing RDBMS systems now used for inventory control and supply chain transactions to automatically access accurate and up-to-date product and company information from the manufacturers.  For example, any manufacturer's  B2B Web site can be easily accessed using product codes, allowing others in the supply chain to use form-based Web pages to open accounts, place and check on orders, and obtain product, pricing and policy information from the manufacturer.
  
  
• Product and company information can be stored and transmitted to others using standard XML schemas.   XML provides the universal, extensible open framework needed to allow simple but universally useful schemas to be introduced early, while permitting more specific needs to be addressed as a consensus emerges, and this data can be dynamically accessed via the Internet by product and company code using the Domain Name System as a directory.
  
  
• XSL can be used to integrate XML data fetched from the manufacturers servers into the consumer's shopping experience.  Depending on the application, the transformation could be executed on the manufacturer's server, the resellers' server, or the client's Web browser.