I have the urge to take this argument to the next level, but I am going to let it die with these last comments – cuz I really don’t have time to get in a bitch fest.

@TrustyPig “admin” – you were wrong. You admitted your guilt and have corrected the situation. Kudos.

@MoneyNewsDouche – you’re accusations are ridiculous. I don’t get why you are expending so much effort to defend your affiliate. Your defense isn’t even ranking you in search results – so what’s the point?

@Harl Compete is the de-facto when comparing site analytics… Alexa is worthless as a user has to have their “toolbar” in order for it to register traffic. If you are what you claim to be you would know this.

@Tony you are spot on. It’s explicit brand ripoff.

The problem here isn’t that TrustyPig is attempting to steal existing customers away from SmartyPig. What we’re talking about is brand association, not customer loyalty. The idea behind TrustyPig’s similar design and name is to attempt to confuse potential SmartyPig customers into thinking they’ve joined up with a legitimate company. They hear the positive flow of news that SmartyPig generates in Google searches, and hope to associate their own service with that brand recognition.

What is “Complete data”? Never heard of them, and I was involved in e-commerce before graphic web browsers were invented.

According to Alexa,com, (an Amazon company), the default 6-month charts on traffic show SmartyPig getting a reach of 0.0005 while TrustyPig gets a reach of twice that – 0.0010.

That much traffic isn’t likely to gag a horse. In fact, it’s not likely to gag a gnat. Both sites get more traffic than this site, admittedly, and more than the new blog I set up in February but less than my old blog, which was on a site I sold in, uh, February, what a coincidence.

I haven’t spent a whole lot of effort trying to figure out whether these sites are in competition with each other, but the whole situation reminds me of a guy in Indiana who opened a restaurant, asking his lawyer to make sure that the name wasn’t in use anywhere in the US.

Six months later, he finds it’s in use in New Jersey, so he throws away all the paper goods he has, pays for new signage, spends something like $20,000 rebranding his restaurant with a new name.

Another six months and he’s out of business. Turns out his great concept wasn’t all that popular with customers.

If TrustyPig was stealing SmartyPig’s customers, that was pretty stupid. They’d have been better off stealing something worth the effort.