Mercent Announces On-Demand Solution for Online Retail Merchandising

Mercent Retail Helps Brand-Driven Retailers Maximize Sales, Boost Gross Margins, and Increase Merchandising Control through Online Marketing Channels

Philadelphia, WA — August 2, 2005 — Mercent, the single solution for online retail merchandising, today announced the launch and immediate customer availability of Mercent Retail, a powerful new subscription-based software service that helps retailers promote and sell products across leading online marketing channels. 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. With Mercent Retail, merchants promote the right products with the right offers in the right online channels.

“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.”

Forrester Research estimates that revenue generated by online marketplaces more than doubled in 2004 and is expected to reach $54.3 billion by 2007, when it will account for 27% of total e-commerce sales. To help retailers capitalize on this market opportunity, Mercent Retail provides 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 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. 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 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."

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