How to Select a Vendor for Online Data Research? (go back »)

In the competitive business world, do you have the intention of gathering products information or pricing online about your competitors in order to improve your competitive ability? If yes, the next question comes, among the thousands of online data research vendors all over the world, which one will you select? Based on these questions, I\'ll share my thoughts on how to select an online data research provider as following.

Reputation among customers. Before you decide to outsource your online data gathering project to an offshore vendor, you should inquire if it has market leadership in the field of data collection. If not, at least, it should have executed similar kind of projects successfully and has reasonable experience.

Source of data. To ensure the quality of the gathered data, the source of the information is extremely important. I’d like to share our experiences here. We have built procedures for collecting data from over 190 countries, using our maintained list of over 1,700 information sources. These data sources are categorized into Primary and Secondary Sources. Examples of Primary Sources are company registry authorities, regulators and stock exchanges, like SEC, FDIC, SOS, Companies House, SEDAR, etc.; Secondary Sources might be company web sites, the Bank for International Settlements, Hoovers, Yahoo, 411.com, D&B, Stock Exchanges, Google search, etc.

Expertise. As a customer, you must be inclined to select a professional vendor in the project or field you want to undertake. For instance, you are a mobile phone manufacturer, and you intend to get a data collection provider to search quotations of other manufacturers’ products in different countries and on different websites (e.g. B2B/B2C/C2C and their official online stores). Before making a decision, you can investigate if there is a mobile phone manufacturer has done the similar research, and which vendor it cooperates with, and is it successful, e.g. NOKIA.

All in all, there are many factors considered in selecting a data research/gathering vendor, and they can be different as your different focus. Making the right choice is the basic and primary step and the good start of a successful data research/gathering project. We are online data research and collection vendor of SAP, Nokia and MultiView. Anything you think I can help, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly via info@devottservice.com.

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