The Aurora, Ohio-based Omni Corporate Services buying group recently announced the expansion of services aimed at serving its members’ business-to-business e-commerce initiatives.

The new relationship with Trade Service (a solutions provider in product date content for wholesale distributors) and Second Phase (a solutions provider in webstores for wholesale distributors) to bring Omni’s webstore and data solutions to its members is dubbed OmniPro eStore and is meant to increase the adoption of a B2B webstore solution to Omni’s 200-plus members while supplementing their current locally focused customer service with 24/7 web-based purchasing and account-management technology, the buying group explained.

“This new partnership will allow all our members to have an e-commerce solution for their wholesale business, no matter how big or small they might be,” said John Aykroyd, president of Omni Corporate Services. “Omni already serves members with a consumer-facing program with MyPlumbingShowroom.com by Bravo Business Media and this new program further supports our members’ B2B initiatives.”

Trade Service and Second Phase complement each other by combining product content management of plumbing and heating vendors (technical specifications, resource pages, marketing features and images) that will be shared by all Omni members. Second Phase consumes this data using its Cloud LSI +PIM product data hub solution which then gets the data to their webstore using the latest cloud-computing technology and software as a service (SAAS) licensing model, Omni further explained.

Offering this solution at the buying group level will dramatically lower the cost so Omni members can stay competitive with the national distributors that already have made a major investment in webstore and data solutions, Omni added.