Best way to merge 2 ecommerce sites

[EugeneF]

Our Client owns two ecommerce websites.

Website A sells 20 related brands.  Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google.

Website B was purchased from a competitor.  It has 1 brand (also sold on site A).  Search results are normally high on the first page of google.

Client wants to consider merging the two sites.   We are looking at options.

Option 1:  Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A.

Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A

Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A

Option 4: ???

Any thoughts on this would be great.  We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.

[EGOL]

In my opinion, any answers given without knowledge of sales and profit data are dangerous.

Also, relative strength of the sites and their competitive markets should be considered.

If either of these are important sites that support a business someone who really knows what tehy are doing should be studying the options - which are greater in number than 3 or 4.

[EugeneF]

I will try and provide some useful information as a follow up.

Sales on site B are slowly dieing.  The brand that this web site  sells is no longer in business.  It has great rankings mainly because no one is competing for this brand and it specializes in that brand.  It has a good link profile from other site pointing to it as a place to get the brand it sells (as they are now hard to find).

Site A is the site that has the longer term potential an is trying to be built up.

If a merger can only help site A sell the brand of site B, then there is no reason to do it. The desire is to boost the overall rankings for site A.

[JamesNorquay]

I work on a big ecommerce client which purchased another ecommerce website, the strategy they eneded up going with was running both websites still as they had such a good name in the market and both had decent ranks. (Option 1)

We can also aim for SERP domination on specific keywords, yet I understand the clients request to take one site down.

I think if you implement cross site 301's and move content to the main site it is evident that their will be a loss in rankings seen.  (options 3)