Mercent Retail – Press Releases - Profit from Amazon, eBay Large Merchant Services, CSE, and Affiliate Network Product Feeds
Mercent Offers New Retail Content Management
Capabilities with Hosted Software Service


Retailers Can Now Make Smarter and Faster Marketing Decisions
on Product Offers and Promotions across Multiple Online Channels


SEATTLE--October 2, 2006-- Mercent, a provider of online marketing technology and services for retail merchants, today announced the addition of new Retail Content Management capabilities to the company's flagship software service, Mercent Retail. The intuitive solution enables online merchants to create and manage customized product content across multiple online marketing channels.

"Utilizing Mercent Retail for online content management, we can optimize the descriptions of individual product SKUs across online marketing channels, without having to pick up the phone to call IT or an outside vendor," said David R. Williams, who manages VWR Education's Science Education Affiliate Network (SEAN). "Now, we have the ability to test offers across multiple channels and see which offers convert at the highest level, ensuring that we're getting the best placements for our product promotions."

Online retailers can easily publish customized data across multiple channels
Online retailers have long desired the ability to create and manage customized SKU-level content across multiple channels in an efficient way. Currently, online marketers task database developers with the tedious process of stringing together different pieces of data in order to make changes or edits to product information syndicated to online shopping channels.

With Mercent's new Retail Content Management capabilities, online marketers can collect product content such as titles, descriptions, price points, brands, manufacturers, keywords, categories and URLs from existing retail management systems including ecommerce Web sites, product catalogs and warehouse management systems. In cases where relevant marketing information does not exist, online marketing managers can create original content within Mercent Retail. The original, edited or new content can then be published across all the channels the merchant supports, including comparison shopping sites and transactional marketplaces. A marketer can edit, revise and customize any offer from a single interface within Mercent Retail and tie this offer back to the retailer's online catalog.

Mercent's new Retail Content Management solution offers powerful tools that enable online merchants to:
  • Easily author product content not currently found in a retailer's existing systems, as well as clean and transform existing content using Mercent's intuitive interface
  • Edit channel offer content, taking advantage of Mercent's support for channel-specific content fields, to maximize profitability at each channel
  • Create manual overrides of catalog feed data, with field-level control of override status, while preserving the original catalog content
  • Take advantage of product and performance criteria filters for each channel to create greater exposure, click-through rates, and conversion through more qualified clicks
  • Benefit from efficient, formula-based editing of individual SKUs and bulk editing of the entire product catalog
  • Apply flexible control to handle rapidly changing market demands and extremely large- scale marketing campaigns
"Today's announcement builds upon our history of offering customers a high level of control and transparency in Mercent Retail. Our new Content Management capabilities provide online merchants with a substantially easier way to apply unique, SKU-level edits across supported shopping channel," says Glen Hamilton, VP of Product Management at Mercent. "In doing so, our customers will maximize the profitability of their product offers and promotions on each channel."

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