If you're looking for help you've come to the right place.
Below are the answers to the most commonly asked questions about ProductBlazer.
If you can't find the answer to your question here, please send us an email at help@productblazer.com.
A product blazer is a power user of the ProductBlazer site. Product blazers are retailer buyers and merchandisers, from businesses of all sizes, looking to expand their product assortment and supplier sources. They are usually smart, motivated professionals who understand the importance of saving time while gaining a competitive edge.
By signing up for a free account, a mere ordinary user is turned into a Product Blazer. Whereas ordinary users are left to fend for themselves with paper, spreadsheets, and traditional bookmarking, product blazers have at their disposal a set of powerful online tools that enhance and organize their product sourcing research.
Do you have what it takes to be a Product Blazer yourself? Find out by signing up today!
Just like a bookmark in your web browser, you can save the interesting suppliers that you find while searching in ProductBlazer.
However, unlike the bookmarks in your web browser, you can access your saved suppliers from any computer by logging into your ProductBlazer account. To get the most out of your account, you can keep notes on your saved suppliers, and you can keep them organized using tags.
There are two important reasons for you to exhibit your products on ProductBlazer.
First, ProductBlazer is visited by tens of thousands of retailers and resellers who are searching for interesting and innovative products every day. When they search, ProductBlazer always returns matches on products first, ahead of matches on any other kind of data. Having your products on ProductBlazer increases your company’s exposure.
Second, ProductBlazer optimizes your catalog for search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN so they drive more traffic to your products. All of your products and product attributes are published to the internet in spider-friendly formats. It’s like having an SEO expert on your team, which can help retail buyers find your products.
There are several ways to publish your products on ProductBlazer.
For a small catalog, you can build products one-by-one, directly in ProductBlazer. You can write descriptions, upload images, and specify pricing and other product data.
For larger catalogs, you can upload comma-separated or other delimited file formats. A wizard guides you though the process of mapping your product fields so your data goes to all the right places, and that products are categorized. You can even include your images as FTP or HTTP locations, and ProductBlazer will fetch them for you. For more information, check out our helpful guide.
Lastly, if you have a catalog online, you can inquire about how ProductBlazer can build your products directly from that. Please contact us for a quote.
The majority of new ProductBlazer traffic comes from the large search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. ProductBlazer scores well with the large search engines because they recognize it as a source of high-quality content regarding wholesale suppliers. And since launch, the volume of traffic they send to ProductBlazer for free has been consistently increasing.
The secret to rich content comes from the fact that ProductBlazer is at heart a search engine. Just like Google or MSN, ProductBlazer spiders your website, building an index of what it finds. ProductBlazer then performs an automatic keyword analysis of your site to determine the terms and phrases that best represent and promote you.
ProductBlazer then publishes your company profile, keywords, and products in a way that attracts the attention of the large search engines. It has happened more than once that ProductBlazer scored higher than the supplier itself on a Google search for that supplier’s URL!
Lastly, ProductBlazer is itself promoted directly. ProductBlazer buys keywords in bulk from the large search engines in order to drive even more traffic to you.
ProductBlazer will periodically visit your website, follow all the links to all your internal pages, examine each page, and build an index of what it finds there to help users find your website through keywords and other parametric searching.
Each exhibitor package includes a set of marketing services and features that are provided over some service billing period. Payments are made at the beginning of a period and are non-refundable. A given package automatically renews at the end of a billing period unless you upgrade, downgrade, or cancel. For full details, read our terms of service.
You can upgrade your package at any time. You will be credited the prorated balance that remains from your current billing period, and a new billing period will begin.
When you cancel your exhibitor package any products you have in your catalog are removed, and any services included with your package are immediately deactivated. Your package will not automatically renew.
Tags are keyword phrases that you create and associate with saved suppliers, and they are your primary tool for organizing them in ProductBlazer. A supplier can have any number of tags associated with it, depending on how many ways you want to group and categorize your work.
For example, suppose you are looking for products for a new Mother’s Day promotion. You’ve decided you want to include kitchen knives and pots and pans.
A search for “cutlery” turns up several hundred supplier candidates. As you look through them, you save suppliers of interest, tagging each with the keywords “knives” and “mothers day”. A search for “pots and pans” similarly gives you a list of candidates to review, and you save a few of these with the tags “pots and pans” and “mothers day”.
When you go back to your Saved Suppliers page, you’ll see the new suppliers as well as a list of all the tags that you’ve created. If you click on the tag “knives”, all of the cutlery suppliers that you saved with that tag will be presented. If you click on the tag “pots and pans”, all the pots and pans suppliers that you’ve saved will be shown.
Lastly, if you click on the tag “mothers day”, you will see all the suppliers saved with that tag, including both the cutlery and the pots and pans suppliers.
ProductBlazer searching works in many ways just like Google, Yahoo, or other search sites you may have used. However, ProductBlazer assumes you are looking for wholesale suppliers and their products, and not blogs, newspaper articles, product review sites, or other extraneous content. Also, rather than returning a list of web pages that match your search query, ProductBlazer gives you a list of suppliers.
Given a search query, a list of suppliers is returned who match the query’s terms with their names, URLs, descriptions, self-selected search terms, or any pages on their web sites. You might also see a set of suggested ‘Related Searches’ that are based on what ProductBlazer knows is on the suppliers’ sites.
A supplier returned in search results is shown in its own white box, with three tabs. The ‘Overview’ tab is on by default, and may show links to content related to your query that are known to be on that supplier’s website. This is an easy way to see why this supplier might have come up for your search. The ‘Website Hits’ tab shows which, if any, pages from that supplier’s website matched the search query. The ‘Contact Info’ requires that you be logged in to view it.
Related Searches are phrases that include the terms from your most recent search query. They point to content and information that is known to exist within the sites of the suppliers listed on ProductBlazer. By clicking on a related search, you will be shown a list of suppliers that match that new phrase, as well as possibly be shown another list of Related Searches for further drill-down.
In a set of search results, a supplier’s profile box may also contain related phrases that are supplier-specific. This is a quick way to see the content in that supplier’s site that relates to your most recent query.
Suppose you are looking for a fresh new line of women’s sandals. The simplest search query is a single word, or term. For example, you could enter the single term:
sandal
This would return suppliers that have the word ‘sandal’ in their name, URL, description, self-selected search terms, or website content. Note that we have not categorized all the sandal suppliers as such in ProductBlazer. Rather, the search engine is finding relevant matches for you based on those criteria. Most of the time this works very well.
You can also use multiple terms to refine your search. To do this, simply enter the terms separated by a space. In your case, what you really want are sandals for women. You could then enter:
sandal women
Here you are asking for all the suppliers that match on the term ‘sandal’ that also match on the term ‘women’. This would return many of the same suppliers as before, but this time suppliers more relevantly associated with the word ‘women’ will appear first. You may enter as many terms in a search query as you like. For example, you might enter:
sandal women leather
More terms in your query restrict your search and generally result in fewer matches.
You can also search for specific phrases by wrapping the words in double-quotes. For example, you might enter:
“women’s sandals”
The set of suppliers that match this will be even more limited than in the first two examples. In this case, only those suppliers with the word “women’s” followed by the word “sandals” will be returned. This is a very good way to specifically target products based on well-known phrases.
Finally, you can exclude a term in a search query by putting a dash/minus sign in front of the word. This means that suppliers that match that term will be excluded from the results. For example, another way to approach our search might be:
sandal -men
An alternative way of writing this would be to use the “NOT” operator in front of the search term. For example, the above search query could also be written:
sandal NOT men
There is no best approach or mixture of terms to use to find exactly what you’re looking for. Instead, you can try all sorts of combinations in your sourcing research. When you find a supplier that is interesting, be sure to save it to mark your trail.
ProductBlazer supports many of the advanced search features that you may be used to from other search engines. For example, there are the famous boolean operators “AND” and “OR”. By default, when you enter multiple search terms, ProductBlazer assumes you meant to use the “AND” operator. That is, the search query:
sandal women
is the same as the logical conjunction:
sandal AND women
This means that you want to see results that match both the term “sandal” and the term “women”, and not just one or the other. Similarly, you can also write:
sandal AND women AND leather
When you have multiple terms in your search query. You can also use the “&” in the place of the “AND” operator and get the same results. That is, the search query:
sandal AND women
and
sandal & women
are exactly the same and will return the same results.
When you want to match one or the other term in such a query, use the “OR” operator, also known as the logical disjunction. For example, suppose you want to find summer shoes, which could include sandals and slippers. You might then enter:
sandal OR slipper
This search query would return suppliers that matched either the term “sandal” or the term “slipper”. Some suppliers in the results would match one term, some would match the other, and the rest would match both. Another way to write the exact same thing is to use the double-pipe characters ”||”. For example, you could have written the last query as:
sandal || slipper
Just like “AND” and “&”, it makes no difference whether you use “OR” or ”||”, the results are the same. You can also have multiple terms OR-ed together. For example, if you wrote:
sandal || slipper || boot
you would get suppliers that matched on any or all of those terms.
You can mix and match the AND and OR operators to build complex queries out of sub-queries using parenthesis. Within a given set of left-right parenthesis, you may build a sub-query using only AND or OR, but not both. For example, if you wrote:
sandal AND (women OR girl)
ProductBlazer would return all the suppliers that matched on the term “sandal” and also matched on either the term “women” or “girl” (but not necessarily both).
Note that the following search query is invalid:
sandal AND (women OR girl AND teen)
since both the OR and the AND operators are found within the same left-right parenthesis set. That’s a no-no.
You can also use NOT with parenthesis by placing it in front of a sub-query much as you would place it in front of a term. For example, you might write:
sandal AND NOT (men OR boy)
ProductBlazer in this case would return those suppliers that matched on “sandal” and also matched on neither “men” nor “boy”.
Finally, ProductBlazer searching supports the notion of wildcards. This means that you can build a search query that looks for patterns of letters to match within words, not just a specific word. The character ”?” is like the joker in a deck of cards – it can match any character. For example, suppose you were looking for suppliers that matched on the words “bit”, “bet”, “bat”, “bat”, or “but”. You could enter the search term:
b?t
and ProductBlazer would return suppliers that matched on all those words. Similarly, the ”*” character in a search term works like one or more joker cards, meaning that you’d like to match one or more characters in its place. For example, the search term:
b*t
would return suppliers who matched on all the words matched by b?t, plus words like “boot”, “boat”, “bittersweet”, “bombast”, and “bucket”.
We build our list of suppliers by automatically scouring the Internet using a large keyword set (e.g., ‘wholesale’, ‘dropship’, etc.) and proprietary algorithms. Most of the time this works, but sometimes the machines get it wrong. While we manually review as many of the listings as we can, we cannot guarantee that all listed companies can appropriately be considered ‘wholesale suppliers’.
We are constantly working to improve the ProductBlazer database. If you see a listing that you think does not belong on ProductBlazer, please let us know about it. We thank you in advance for your help.
If you see your company listed on ProductBlazer and would like to claim the listing as your own, click the “This is my company” link on the supplier profile page and fill out the claim form. We will contact you to verify that you are really the owner of the company in question.
A free account will be created for you. Once your claim is approved by ProductBlazer staff, your login screen will include tabs and links to help you manage your profile. You will then be able to write an improved description for yourself, update contact info, and correct anything we might have wrong.
Lastly, you should be sure to add additional information such as search terms to improve your company’s chances of being found on ProductBlazer.
First you must claim your account and wait until your claim has been approved.
Then, once you login, click on the Profile link. From here you will be able to edit all of your company information, including categorization.
Please note that all such profile changes are subject to review before they are made available on the public site. Also, the Profile link will not be available if your claim has not yet been approved.
All profile changes are subject to review and approval before they are made available on the public site. We do this to help protect your information and ensure the accuracy of our listings. Profile changes will generally become available in one business day. If it has been longer than one business day please contact us.
New supplier entries or profile edits can take up to one business day to appear in search results. If it has been longer than this, please contact us.
Beyond that, you may want to ensure that you have included a good company description and search terms in your supplier profile. These will be used to match you against user search queries.
You must first sign up and then claim your profile. Once your claim is verified, you can choose to opt out of our listing via your Supplier Profile page. Fill out the information in the Opt Out form and you will be immediately and permanently removed from our index.
Search terms are words that a site user or Product Blazer might use to try to find you. For example, if you sell kitchen accessories, some relevant terms to enter for yourself might be: “knives”, “cutting boards”, “cutlery”, “kitchen accessories”, and “flatware”. Enter as many search terms as you’d like that describe your business.
The email associated with your listing will be used to forward trade leads and other communications to your company. This should be to a salesperson, marketer, customer representative, or a general ‘info’ account. Typically, the email used by a supplier is the same as what’s provided publicly on its website for such contacts. Please be sure to read our privacy policy.
Advertising as a Featured Supplier on ProductBlazer is an effective way stand out from the other suppliers in our listing. It helps to ensure that you will be seen by the thousands of retail buyers and merchandisers who use our site every day.
First you must claim your account and wait until your claim has been approved. Then, be sure that you are correctly categorized under your Profile tab.
Follow the link to sign up for featured placement, select the categories you’d like to be featured in, and enter your credit card and other information. It’s that easy!
Please contact us for more information on other advertising opportunities.
