There has been a lot of noise recently from our competitors about merchandising. We see it in their marketing and we hear it from our prospective customers. Our competitors are saying that they offer merchandising controls and we don’t. I have found this to be an interesting exercise and I must admit initially I was confused as to what they were talking about – I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what they meant. We host the search for over 100, predominantly e-commerce sites and usually cater to all their requests. So what could these mysterious merchandising features be?

I did some research, including sitting in on a couple of our competitors webinars (using the deceptive pseudonym of Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, Inc). It ends up we already offer most of the merchandising features they were talking about – we just don’t call them by the same name.

So, to clear up the confusion, we have set up a page summarizing some of our merchandising capabilities. We’re going to be updating it and linking to examples of our customers who are taking advantage of these capabilities. If you take a look I think you’ll find we’re extremely competitive. Watch this space – there’s more coming.

The lesson from this – if you’re looking to buy site search (or anything for that matter) don’t always believe what one vendor says about the other. Unless of course you’re talking to us :-).