How listings work on thinking.lu

The three listing levels

Free editorial submission. The baseline, and the only one most vendors need. You tell us what you built, we verify what we can, and the profile is eligible for every comparison in its category. No charge, no influence, no publication guarantee. Every product we profile gets this whether the vendor ever contacts us or not.

Verified data. The vendor confirms the factual record, we check it against a public source, we date it and we re-check it on a schedule. What this buys is accuracy and speed of correction, plus a dated marker that says the pricing and feature data was confirmed by the vendor and checked by us. What it does not buy is a better score. Verification establishes that a fact is true. Grading is a separate act and it stays with the desk.

Labelled sponsored placement. A block of space, marked as sponsored, outside the ranked list. It carries your own copy, subject to being true, and its links are rendered with rel="sponsored nofollow". It is labelled on every surface it appears on, including feeds and search results inside the site. It never appears inside a ranked table, it never replaces a ranked entry, and it never changes the order of one.

Prices for the two paid levels live in configuration and are rendered on the get-listed page. That is deliberate. An article that quoted a price would be stale the day the price changed, and a guide that is casual about its own numbers has no standing to check anyone else's.

The editorial firewall

Money never buys a ranking position, an editorial score, the removal of a weakness, or a kinder verdict. Concretely:

• Scores and ranking order are set by the desk against criteria published on the page, before any commercial conversation about that page.
• Sponsored blocks sit outside the ranked list and are labelled. A reader who skims should still be able to tell within one second what is editorial and what is bought.
• Every paid or compensated link carries rel="sponsored nofollow". Google's own spam policy requires exactly that for links that change hands for money, and a guide that ignores it is selling its readers' trust and its own index position at the same time.
• Paying us does not stop us writing that your product is the wrong answer for a use case. If that is unacceptable, do not buy a placement here.
• We do not take payment to remove a competitor, to alter a published weakness, or to delay a critical piece.
• We do not publish user ratings we did not collect ourselves, and we do not emit review or rating structured data for numbers we cannot stand behind.

This is also the law, not only our preference. EU consumer rules, as amended in 2019 and applicable since 28 May 2022, require a trader who ranks products to disclose the main parameters of that ranking, and the European Commission's guidance on the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive covers transparency of search results and consumer reviews explicitly. Under the Digital Services Act, an advertisement must be identifiable as an advertisement, with the advertiser named. Labelling sponsored placement is the floor, not a favour.

How to report a factual error, and how fast we fix it

Send the page URL, the sentence that is wrong, the correct fact, and a link that proves it, to desk@thinking.lu.

• We acknowledge within two working days.
• A verified factual error is corrected within five working days. Prices usually go faster, because a price check is one page load.
• Corrections that change the meaning of a sentence get a dated correction note at the foot of the page. We do not edit silently and pretend the earlier version did not exist.
• If we disagree with your correction, you get the reason in writing and the source we relied on.
• What we will not do is remove a finding that is true and inconvenient. A negative but accurate line stays.

Vendors on the verified level get a named contact and the same deadlines in writing. Nobody else waits longer because they did not pay. The deadline is the same for a reader, a competitor and a customer.

Independence statement

Thinking is published by TTA Technologies in Luxembourg, which also builds LUXPOS, Salonify, BoxBee and DepotGest. Those products appear in our comparisons, because a Luxembourg POS comparison that omitted LUXPOS would be incomplete and dishonest in the other direction.

The rules we hold ourselves to:

• Every page that names one of the four carries a disclosure block saying who owns what.
• Own products get no score bonus and no extra weight in any criterion.
• Where an own product wins a category, the reason is concrete and checkable, for example per-article VAT handling or three staff languages, and it is stated in the same words we would use for a competitor.
• Where a competitor is better for a use case, we write that in plain words. There are already comparisons on this site where a competitor beats one of our own products.
• Own-product links are normal editorial links, and they are never sold as placements to ourselves.

If you think we have broken one of these rules on a specific page, write to desk@thinking.lu with the URL. That is a correction request like any other and it runs on the same clock.

What to do next

If you are a vendor deciding whether to bother, read how to get your software listed in comparisons first, because most of the work is on your own website. If you are weighing what a listing is worth, what a software guide charges for a listing has the market numbers. When you are ready, the form is at /en/get-listed.