Twenty Five Leading Retailers Partner with Mercent to Maximize Revenues and Profits through Online Marketing Channels; Cutter & Buck, FLAX art & design, and The Right Start Adopt Mercent Retail

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 18, 2006-- Mercent, a provider of online marketing technology and services for retail merchants, today announced the addition of twenty five new Mercent Retail customers. Mercent Retail, the company's on-demand platform, enables the world's top retail brands to promote and sell products to more than 150 million shoppers across online product marketing channels through one low-cost, single point of integration. Mercent's latest retail customers, including Cutter & Buck, Woolrich, The Right Start, FLAX art & design, Astral Brands, Zaccardi's, Limoges Jewelry, and Science Kit (VWR International), are utilizing Mercent Retail to maximize online sales, profits, and merchandising control across online shopping portals, affiliate networks, and marketplaces.

"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 500 merchant. "We rely on Mercent Retail to help us make more informed online product marketing decisions."

Mercent Retail integrates with existing back-end retail systems so marketers can make smarter online marketing decisions informed by back-end operational metrics including product inventory, cost of goods sold, and gross margin. Mercent Retail is a scalable platform that automates the scheduling, translation and transportation of product, inventory, order, referral, conversion, and financial settlement data for every SKU in the unique assortment assigned to each marketing channel.

Expanding online retail market requires advanced suite of tools

Industry experts project that today's $136 billion online retail market will grow to $300 billion and 13% of total US retail sales by 2010. Forrester Research estimates that online marketplace revenue is expected to reach $54.3 billion by next year, accounting for 27% of e-commerce sales.

"To stay competitive, merchants must capitalize on third-party online marketing channels," says Mercent CEO Eric Best. "More retailers than ever are benefiting from Mercent Retail, which offers easy product syndication across disparate marketing channels, clear analytics measuring profitability and inventory impact, and the ability to create unique, channel-specific product assortments and merchandising offers."

The latest release of Mercent's flagship software service includes Search Engine Marketing (SEM) analytics tools, offered at no additional cost to Mercent Retail subscribers. The expanded service, Mercent Retail Analytics, quantifies keyword performance in terms of critical retail business metrics including per-product revenue, profitability, inventory velocity, and return on inventory investment.

Mercent's featured customers are listed on the company's Web site at http://www.mercent.com/customers.aspx.

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