From December 2007

By M.V. Greene

ProductBlazer.com is all about satisfying the product-hungry but resource-strapped small, independent retailer.

“Imagine we’re Google, but we only focus on wholesale suppliers,” says Richard Jones, CEO of Initiate Commerce, the Albany, N.Y.-based software company that operates ProductBlazer.

Small retail operators cannot always take time away from the business to search out new products at trade shows, Jones says. The objective of the ProductBlazer service, therefore, is to bring small retailers with limited product buying opportunities together with wholesale suppliers using search-engine technology.

Jones says small retailers that search the Internet for product typically come up with results comprising names of resellers or other retailers of a particular product, along with reviews and price comparisons. Additionally, wholesalers aren’t as adept as retailers at marketing themselves over the Internet, so it can be difficult to find the unique products they offer.

ProductBlazer is part of a growing movement among marketers to make their goods and services available on interactive media. In October, Forrester Research reported that search marketing is growing at a compound annual rate of 26 percent and will triple – to $25 billion – by 2012.

Supported by vertical search engine technology, ProductBlazer works by collecting information on wholesale suppliers that offer innovative products and providing retailers with access to those products through keyword and category search.

The service is free for both retailers and suppliers; Jones says the service’s business model eventually will be advertising-supported. Currently, products from about 41,000 wholesalers can be accessed.

Jones, a technologist who describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur,” says the difference between searching ProductBlazer and the likes of Google, Yahoo! and MSN is that only wholesalers will be found in the ProductBlazer search. “We take a list [consisting solely of] wholesale suppliers and build search technology that goes out and crawls and indexes just their sites, nothing else,” he says.

Ask the wizard
Wholesalers that want to list on ProductBlazer can publish products themselves on the site by building items one-by-one and adding descriptions, uploading images and specifying pricing and other product data. A wizard on the site that maps and categorizes product fields can be used to upload larger catalogs. ProductBlazer staff will also build products into the site for a fee.

The system “allows the suppliers to have an online presence with all of their catalog products year round,” Jones says. “Even if they already have an online product catalog, and many of them do, what we’re finding is they’re not very well optimized.”

As the service evolves, he says, ProductBlazer will offer new and innovative features for retailers and wholesalers in the online directory space. One will be to facilitate social/networking interactions between the two groups through private showcasing.