Our Unique Story

We started as e-commerce sellers and not a software company. We began selling online in the early ’90s, well before any Minimum Advertised Pricing policies existed. We grew our business to doing over a half million in sales every month. Life was good.

Somewhere around 2003 manufacturers came to us with their MAP pricing policies. We were happy to comply. We were the good guys after all, with a full-time customer service department. We hoped this would lead to greater margins. After all, it is no fun trying to make a living with 1% margins!

Soon we noticed a problem. Our sales were declining. We discovered that our sales stopped for all clients with MAP policies. Here we were expecting greater margins, but instead, we got the exact opposite. This was extremely frustrating, to say the least. We contacted the manufacturers and told them to please police their MAP violators better because good guys like us were losing sales to the shady site operators who were sitting around in their underwear, offering no pre or post-sales support. The manufacturers were aware of the problem, but it was very difficult to clean up all the violators

One day in a fit of anger and frustration David wrote some software to find all the MAP violators out there. He sent the lists to the manufacturers to show them the problem we were facing.

The manufacturers were very surprised because they had not known a lot of the violators. They soon started asking for additional copies of reports to help them, which we provided.

This soon grew into a side business and the features and capabilities grew and grew.

As entrepreneurs ourselves we discovered we really liked helping companies protect their brands. We connected with the owners of companies who had taken great risks and invested their lives into brands. They were frustrated that the Internet was destroying the value of their brand. We found we were able to really help and it felt good.