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 is a leading provider of online channel marketing technology and services for retailers. Through its award-winning Mercent Retail™ SAAS technology and Mercent Performance™ professional services, Mercent helps the world’s most successful online merchants including 1-800-Flowers, Bass Pro Shops, Brookstone, GUESS?, L'Occitane USA, Redcats Group, and REI optimize online shopping channel marketing campaigns to drive customer acquisition, revenues, profits, and inventory velocity. Mercent is the single point of integration with a vast online advertising network that includes transactional marketplaces such as Amazon.com and eBay; comparison shopping engines (CSEs) such as Shopping.com and NextTag; affiliate marketing programs such as LinkShare and the Google Affiliate Network; and other product advertising channels including Microsoft Bing Cashback and Google Product Listing Ads (PLA). The company is a 'Selling on Amazon.com' Certified System Integrator, Buy.com Gold Certified Partner, eBay Certified Provider, certified Google Product Search Partner. Founded by a seasoned team of Amazon.com veterans, 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