New Service to Help Jewelers Combat Online Price Comparisons
January 11, 2011A new online service has been launched that aims to help jewelry retailers combat the challenge of consumers comparing diamond prices on the internet.
Jacques Voorhees, founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Polygon, and Bill Boyajian, former President of the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), have joined forces to offer the Daily Diamond Report (DDR) from VeriChannel, which provides subscribers with an exclusive list of freshly graded diamonds directly from the diamond-grading laboratories of the GIA and the American Gem Society (AGS).
DDR stones, which are automatically posted within hours of grading, have not yet appeared anywhere else on the internet, and therefore cannot be "shopped" by consumers across multiple websites. The DDR service allows clients of these labs to pre-market their diamonds to a global audience before the stones have even physically left the lab and before the grading reports have even been printed. The DDR includes seller contact information, a PDF file of the certificate and full grading details in searchable format.
"The Daily Diamond Report cuts as many as seven days off the time when freshly-graded inventory can be seen by buyers. It also expands the audience of potential buyers via email distribution of the data," says VeriChannel Chairman Bill Boyajian.
"One of our primary goals was to give retailers some protection against internet price-shopping. DDR addresses the problem of the same diamond appearing on dozens of B2C websites simultaneously," adds VeriChannel President Jacques Voorhees.
Hundreds of diamonds each day, owned by sightholders and dealers, in Mumbai, Antwerp, Ramat Gan, and New York, are now being fed automatically from the GIA and AGS labs into the DDR, according to the VeriChannel.
The DDR is a unit of VeriChannel, LLC, a company formed by Boyajian and Voorhees to provide innovative online services to the trade. The company is also launching a specialized search engine for the jewelry industry that is powered by Google technology as well as other products for release later in 2011.
The DDR is free, both to the companies who post diamonds and to buyers from the trade who participate.
To subscribe to the DDR, Verichannel.com
https://www.diamondintelligence.com/magazine/magazine.aspx?id=9218
