PromoTech

How do you find products? Do you use printed catalogs? Or supplier websites? Or do you pay for tools like ASI or SAGE provide for searching products? As much as I'd like to see more automated processing of orders in the promotional products industry (and groups like the ePromoStandards Alliance are doing an admirable job of advancing the technology here), the simple act of finding products in the first place can be incredibly cumbersome, especially if you don't want to pay a fee for access to the information.

We've been trying out a product sourcing experiment called Product Buffet that allows anyone to search tens of thousands of promotional products all in one place, for free, and takes you to the supplier's website once you've found the product you like. Try it out and let me know what you think. I believe information should be free so Product Buffet works like any other search engine - it's free, but will soon have simple advertising to support it. Is this an idea whose time has come? I'll leave that up to you to decide. Try it and let me know what you think.