Mercent Launches Free Retail Analytics Services for Online Merchants; On-demand Solution Tracks Profitability and Inventory Impact of Online Marketing Channels for Retail Advertisers

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 18, 2006-- Mercent, a provider of online marketing technology and services for retail merchants, today announced the availability and free inclusion of retail Web analytics through the company's flagship software service, Mercent Retail. The new service, Mercent Retail Analytics, provides comprehensive reports of online marketing performance - capturing, calculating and presenting critical retail business metrics including revenue, profitability and return on inventory investment generated by every product on every online marketing channel. Mercent Retail Analytics is included at no additional cost to subscribers of Mercent Retail.

"Mercent makes it easy to understand the profitability and inventory impact of shopping portals and marketplaces for every product in our catalog," said Ann Schneider, VP of Internet and Advertising at Limoges Jewelry, an Internet Retailer Top 400 merchant. "We rely on Mercent Retail Analytics to help us make more informed online product marketing decisions."

Mercent Retail allows e-tailers and multi-channel retailers to effectively promote and sell products to more than 100 million shoppers across leading online product marketing channels through one low-cost, single point of integration.

Web Analytics and Retail Metrics

Retailers recognize that de facto standards for measuring advertising performance such as Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) fall short of providing the most important measures of retail success. To make informed advertising decisions, retailers must know how a given product promoted through a given online channel contributes to Gross Profit (GP), Life Time Value (LTV), and even Gross Margin Return on Inventory Investment (GMROII).

Mercent Retail Analytics

To calculate these retail metrics for online advertising campaigns, Mercent Retail collects and combines sales, conversion and ad spend information from online marketing channels with the retail operational data found in back-end retail systems including per-product cost of goods sold (COGS) and average inventory values.

Mercent Retail Analytics allows online merchants to:

• Automatically track and report all traffic, conversions, and orders across all referral-based online channels such as Yahoo! Shopping and Shopzilla, and transactional channels such as Amazon.com and SHOP.COM
• Automatically calculate and report return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) for each online channel in terms of profitability and return on inventory investment
• Track and report performance to individual product SKUs
• Issue persistent, first-party, P3P-compliant cookies to support browser security best-practices and measure customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Capture published offer and ad content for every referral and conversion event to improve merchandising and advertising offers
• Track and report ad spend and the cost to acquire transactions and customers across fixed-CPC, bid-CPC, and revenue share (commission-based) channels
• Ensure tracking and referral reliability with software distributed through Akamai Technologies' application performance services.
• Integrate tracking tags with third-party Web analytics packages including CoreMetrics, Omniture, WebTrends, and WebSideStory.
• Integrate directly with existing e-commerce and retail management systems; there is no redundant shopping cart or order pipeline to adopt

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