Find Wholesale Suppliers with the New ProductBlazer Search Engine

May 18, 2007 - Albany, NY -- Software startup Initiate Commerce, Inc. today announced the general availability of ProductBlazer.com, an online search portal designed for the millions of retail buyers on the lookout for new products and wholesale suppliers. This follows a limited beta launch in February 2007.

"Retailers are constantly on the Internet looking for new products and wholesale suppliers", said Richard Jones, CEO of Initiate Commerce, Inc. "For them it's not just about search – it's about ongoing research. ProductBlazer is the tool that helps them streamline and organize that process."

ProductBlazer is free for retailers. An online account includes tools to manage saved lists of suppliers, allowing the retailer to organize their research by category and keywords. A retailer's research is stored securely in ProductBlazer itself, making it available from anywhere on the Internet. A basic listing for a supplier is also free, with premium search placement and advertising available to paying customers.

ProductBlazer actively crawls the web collecting qualified wholesale suppliers of interesting and innovative products. As a result, ProductBlazer is already one of the largest wholesale supplier directories on the Internet. ProductBlazer then indexes the websites and product catalogs of these suppliers. However, unlike a general-purpose search engine, ProductBlazer indexes nothing else.

"It can be a challenge to find the wholesale supplier of a particular product on Google or Yahoo," says Erik Morton, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Initiate Commerce, Inc. "The retailers and resellers of that product usually come up first in your search results, not the wholesale supplier. And then you've got other irrelevant hits like blogs and newspaper articles. ProductBlazer filters all that out and returns only a list of matching suppliers."

The team at Initiate Commerce, Inc. has over 20 years of combined experience providing technology and services for world-class retailers and their wholesale suppliers, including Target, Sears, Staples, Circuit City, Costco, Home Depot, QVC, Costco and Dell. Having worked with these and other companies, the team understood the challenge of forever looking for new products to sell. They realized that by creating software that scoured hundreds of thousands of supplier web pages, and then providing access to an index via a search engine, they could provide retailers with instant access to a universe of new products. But this is only the start.

"Finding the right products and business partners is always the first step for a retailer", says Jason Fox, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer. "But there is a whole relationship to manage afterwards that we feel is currently under-served in the market. ProductBlazer is the first in a line of B2B applications that Initiate Commerce, Inc. will release in the coming quarters."

ProductBlazer currently lists over 25,000 wholesale suppliers and distributors in its growing index. Retailers of any size can access ProductBlazer for free at:  http://productblazer.com.