Mercent,
an online retail merchandising solutions provider, today announced the
launch and immediate customer availability of Mercent Retail, a new
subscription-based software service that helps retailers promote and
sell products across leading online marketing channels.
According to a company statement, Mercent Retail offers retailers
"greater product visibility online, increased control over product
merchandising and promotions within third-party channels, and the
ability to measure online advertising performance by key retail metrics
such as per-product gross margins."
"We are thrilled to offer merchants an easier way to reach millions
of online consumers with dynamic merchandising offers coordinated
across online channels," said Eric Best, CEO of Mercent. "Our customers
promote higher-performance product assortments defined by key metrics
such as availability and gross margin. And Mercent's interests are
exactly aligned with our customers' through our pay-for-performance
pricing model."
To help retailers capitalize on the growing popularity of online
shopping, Mercent Retail claims to provide maximum product visibility
across 20 online marketing channels including Amazon.com, AOL inStore,
Become.com, BizRate.com, CatalogCity.com, CNET Shopper.com, Commission
Junction, Epinions, Froogle, LinkShare, MSN Shopping, mySimon.com,
NexTag, PriceGrabber.com, PriceRunner, SHOP.com, Shopping.com,
Shopzilla, Smarter.com, and Yahoo! Shopping. Among these channels,
PriceRunner (see related story) is the most recent to launch in the U.S. market.
"We are delighted that Mercent now offers its retail customers
native support for PriceRunner, and automation of product merchandising
assortments delivered to online shoppers through our platform. Mercent
enables PriceRunner sellers to manage more SKUs, described by more
complete and timely merchandising data which helps ensure the ongoing
quality of our merchants' content and in turn, higher satisfaction
among our shoppers," said Martin Andersen, U.S. General Manager of
PriceRunner.
Mercent Retail enables marketing managers to automate sophisticated
merchandising campaigns for specific product assortments across online
channels. Because Mercent Retail integrates with existing back-end
retail systems, managers can make smarter online marketing decisions
informed by back-end operational metrics including product inventory,
cost of goods sold and gross margin, according to the company's
statement.
Mercent Retail automates the scheduling, orchestration, translation
and transportation of product, inventory, order, referral, conversion
and financial settlement data for every SKU in the assortment and each
assigned marketing channel. The platform reportedly scales to support
millions of online product SKUs, referrals, conversions and orders.
"With the percentage of online gross merchandise sales attributable
to third-party marketplaces, shopping portals, affiliate programs, and
search engines growing at more than 25% annually, online retailers
continue to invest in tools to reach more of their addressable market,"
said Leslie Ament, Director of Market Analytics, Aberdeen Group, Inc.
"One of the challenges retailers face in this multi-channel
environment, is to provide a seamless customer experience while
maintaining a consistent brand across all touchpoints. Mercent Retail
provides a solution that allows Internet vendors to manage
merchandising offers beyond the confines of their own e-commerce site."
