Mercent Commerce System Now Enables Retailers to Reach
100 Million Monthly Shoppers at
Amazon.com, AOL Shopping, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping,
MSN Shopping, BizRate.com, PriceGrabber.com, NexTag, mySimon, and Froogle

Seattle, WA - August 3, 2004 - Mercent, the single solution for online marketplace retailing, today announced the latest release of its flagship software product, Mercent Commerce System, with expanded support for ten online retail channels. Mercent Commerce System now enables retailers to effectively promote and sell products to more than 100 million shoppers across 10 leading online consumer marketplaces through one low-cost, single point of integration.

AOL Shopping is among the leading online retail marketplaces supported by this latest product release. "We are pleased that Mercent now offers its retail customers native support for AOL Shopping's comprehensive product catalog" said William Bradford, Executive Director, AOL Product Marketing. "AOL Shopping greatly expands the market reach of merchants using Mercent Commerce System."

Reaching More Than 100 Million Shoppers
Online retail sales are expected to reach nearly $230 billion by 2008, according to Forrester Research, while the number of monthly shoppers using online consumer marketplaces already exceeds 100 million. "Merchants recognize the value of low-cost access to these highly popular channels for customer acquisition," said Mercent CEO, Eric Best. "With Mercent Commerce System, our retailing customers gain access to an even greater share of this rapidly growing market through a single point of integration."

Combined, Mercent Commerce System marketplaces connect retailers with more than 100 million monthly online shoppers and include Amazon.com, AOL Shopping, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, MSN Shopping, BizRate.com, PriceGrabber.com, NexTag, mySimon, and Froogle.

Retailer Benefits
Mercent offers a suite of software and value-added services that enable 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. 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 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