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
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