Car Toys Amplifies Online Sales using Mercent Software

Leading National Retailer Selects Mercent Commerce System to Maximize Sales through Amazon.com and Leading Online Shopping Portals

Seattle, WA — September 16th, 2004 — Mercent, the single solution for online marketplace retailing, today announced that its flagship software product, Mercent Commerce System, has been selected by Car Toys for selling products through the world’s leading online consumer marketplaces. Car Toys, a leading specialty retailer of mobile electronics and wireless phones in the United States, has successfully integrated and deployed Mercent Commerce System to merchandise and sell products to over 42 million active customer accounts at Amazon.com, and 60 million monthly shoppers at Yahoo! Shopping, BizRate.com, PriceGrabber.com, AOL Shopping, NexTag, MSN Shopping, Shopping.com, mySimon, and Froogle.

Car Toys was seeking a single solution to capitalize on the tremendous growth of online retailing through additional channels while minimizing their IT and resource investments. “Mercent offered an enterprise-grade solution for our new Amazon.com relationship and expanded our product merchandising reach to include nine online shopping portals. This has contributed to a dramatic increase in online revenues since installation. Even more importantly it has helped us materially increase our profit per transaction. As a truly integrated solution, Mercent Commerce System has far exceeded our expectations,” said Glen Hamilton, Director of E-Commerce for Car Toys.

Flexible Technology for Maximizing Online Sales
In less than 30 days, Mercent Commerce System was installed in Car Toys’ data center and fully integrated with Amazon.com and nine leading online shopping portals. Mercent Commerce System’s relational data store stages unique Car Toys product and promotional data for each online marketplace to maximize control over merchandising. Car Toys uses Mercent Commerce System to expand and automate their marketplace relationships – immediately reaching new customers while reducing the complexity and ongoing IT maintenance costs associated with these channels. Hamilton explains, “Supporting ten partners with ten separate integrations involves significant internal resources. Supporting ten partners with Mercent Commerce System requires minimal maintenance, reducing our cost of merchandising.”

Mercent offers a suite of software and value-added services that enables retailers to maximize online sales, reduce costs, and speed time to market by managing the merchandising and sale of products through the world's leading online consumer marketplaces. Mercent Commerce System is a highly scalable application that facilitates the automated, scheduled exchange of product, order, inventory, fulfillment, and settlement data between a merchant's data center and consumer marketplaces' Web services-based interfaces. Mercent Commerce System scales to support more than 1 million orders per day and catalogs with more than 500,000 SKUs. In less than 30 minutes, Mercent Commerce System can be installed in a retailer's data center and can be fully integrated with leading consumer marketplaces in less than 30 days. Once the integration is complete, the solution's message-based architecture prevents downtime and transaction failures to maximize sales.

About Car Toys
Car Toys is a leading specialty retailer of mobile electronics and wireless phones in the United States. In 1987, Dan Brettler founded Car Toys in Bellevue, Washington with a goal to forge a company dedicated to delivering the finest mobile electronics and personal communications products and services. Today, Car Toys has not only achieved this goal but continues to surpass it everyday with the commitment of its 1,200 dedicated professionals in over 54 retail locations throughout Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Texas and online at cartoys.com. In addition to receiving the Audio Video International Retailer of the Year award numerous times, Car Toys has been voted by the consumer electronics industry as the #1 Auto Sound Retailer in the United States 11 years in a row.

About Mercent
Founded by veterans of Amazon.com, Mercent provides online marketing technology and services to help retail merchants optimize performance across online channels. Mercent's on-demand platform, Mercent Retail, increases revenue and gross margins by promoting the right products with the right merchandising offers and placement. Mercent Retail provides a single point of integration between existing retail management systems and The Mercent Shopping Network, supporting more than 50 leading online marketing channels including transactional marketplaces such as Amazon.com and SHOP.COM, shopping portals such as Shopping.com and Shopzilla, paid inclusion programs like Yahoo! Search Submit Pro, and affiliate marketing programs such as LinkShare and Performics -- making it easy for merchants to automate, measure, and optimize online product merchandising campaigns through these channels. Mercent customers include 1-800-Flowers, Benefit Cosmetics, REI, GUESS?, Bass Pro Shops, Redcats Group, Celebrate Express, Levenger, and other leading retailers. Mercent is an Amazon.com Certified System Integrator, Buy.com Gold Certified Partner, SHOP.COM Certified Data Feed Provider, and Yahoo! Search Submit Pro certified feed provider. Mercent is a venture-funded company based in Seattle, WA. For more information, visit www.mercent.com.

Contact
Marnie Cannon
Communications Director, Mercent
206-832-3900
press@mercent.com