WorldWide Retail Exchange reaches agreement for language standardization

The WorldWide Retail Exchange, a business-to-business exchange for retailers and suppliers, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement with UDEX to deliver a universal standard for product attributes and value descriptions.

"The UDEX/WWRE partnership is a significant step forward in reaching the Exchange`s vision of enabling global trading partners to transact with globally standardized data," said Don Norman, chief information officer of the WWRE. "UDEX shares our vision that providing structured, standardized and quality data is essential to the success of e-commerce. We regard this as an important step toward ensuring that anyone around the world who needs to buy a product will be able to find that product."

Through the agreement, the WWRE will be able to ensure product information is standardized before it enters the Exchange environment, regardless of the source. In addition, UDEX`s system has translation capabilities, which allows suppliers to avoid manual re-entry of information for each language required by global trading partners

"We`re very pleased with this development. We understand from our own experience using UDEX how much it simplifies the way we send and receive information about products," said Philip Clarke, IT and logistics director, Tesco Plc. "The WWRE`s agreement with UDEX will help accelerate the process of establishing universal standards for retailers and manufacturers."

UDEX provides structured, standardized, cleansed product descriptions for use in e-commerce.

The WWRE is an Internet-based business-to-business exchange in the retail e-marketplace, designed to facilitate and simplify trading between retailers, suppliers, partners and distributors. The WWRE consists of 58 retail members from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America with combined sales of over U.S. $830 billion.