Mercent Announces Enhanced Retail Software for Pay-For-Performance Online Data Feed Marketing

Mercent Retail helps online merchants maximize product visibility across multiple shopping portals and marketplaces while minimizing advertising costs

SEATTLE--April 11, 2006 — Mercent, a provider of online marketing technology and services for retail merchants, today announced the latest release of its on-demand platform, Mercent Retail, with enhanced support for comparison shopping engines and online marketplaces.

Promoting retail products within the correct categories on each comparison shopping site is critical to successful online selling. If products do not appear where consumers expect, merchants miss valuable opportunities to capture and convert online shoppers. Since cost-per-click (CPC) rates for product categories within shopping portals can vary by more than 50 percent, the combination of category mapping and CPC bid management features within Mercent Retail ensures that merchants maximize product visibility while minimizing advertising cost.

"Every online customer counts," said Ryan Schuehle, Online Marketing Manager at Celebrate Express. "And Mercent helps Celebrate Express promote our products in the right locations and with the most efficient allocation of ad spend on comparison shopping sites."

Mercent Retail’s new category mapping features make certain that every product promoted to consumers through third-party shopping portals and online marketplaces is presented within the optimal category on each channel. Mercent Retail allows non-technical marketing managers to map local e-commerce product categories to the unique product taxonomy of each online shopping channel through a single user interface.

In addition, Mercent Retail’s new CPC bid management features help merchants ensure that the right ad budget is allocated to the right products on the right online marketing channels. The platform maintains channel and category level CPC rates for fixed-price shopping portals to ensure accurate reporting of return on ad spend. Mercent Retail also allows users to specify cost-per-click bid amounts at the SKU level for each online shopping portal that supports pay-for-performance bidding, including Shopzilla, NexTag, and Smarter.com.

“Our advertisers are impressed with the level of automation and control available through Mercent Retail,” said Talmadge O'Neill, Co-Founder of Smarter.com. “Mercent Retail helps Smarter.com merchants achieve greater scale and specificity in their online advertising activities.”

Mercent Retail allows e-tailers and multi-channel retailers to effectively promote and sell products to more than 100 million shoppers across leading online consumer marketplaces through one low-cost, single point of integration. Mercent-supported channels include Amazon.com, AOL inStore, Become.com, BizRate.com, CatalogCity.com, CNET Shopper.com, Commission Junction, Epinions, FindGift.com, Froogle, LinkShare, MSN Shopping, mySimon.com, NexTag, PriceGrabber.com, PriceRunner, SHOP.COM, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Smarter.com, and Yahoo! Shopping.

About Mercent
Mercent provides online marketing technology and services to help retail merchants optimize performance across online marketing channels. Mercent's on-demand platform, Mercent Retail, connects existing retail management systems and The Mercent Shopping Network, a network of more than 50 online shopping destinations including transactional marketplaces such as Amazon.com and eBay Large Merchant Services, comparison shopping engines (CSEs) such as Shopping.com and Shopzilla, paid inclusion programs like Yahoo! Search Submit Pro, and affiliate marketing programs such as LinkShare and Google Affiliate Network. Mercent Retail makes it easy for merchants to increase revenue and gross margins by promoting the right products with the right merchandising offers and placement using optimized product data feeds to these key retail channels.

Mercent customers include 1-800-Flowers, Bass Pro Shops, Brookstone, GUESS?, L'Occitane USA, Redcats Group, REI, and other leading retailers. Mercent is an Amazon.com Certified System Integrator, Buy.com Gold Certified Partner, SHOP.COM Certified Data Feed Provider, certified Google Product Search Partner and Yahoo! Search Submit Pro certified feed provider. Founded by veterans of Amazon.com, Mercent is a venture-funded company based in Seattle, WA. For more information, visit www.mercent.com.

Mercent PR Contact:
Kristine Szarkowitz
press@mercent.com
Tel: 206-832-3900