Mercent Announces 914% Average Merchant ROAS Through Online Shopping Portals and Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs)

Mercent Performance Customers Achieve 247% of Retail Industry Benchmarks

SEATTLE, WA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- May 23, 2007 -- Mercent, a provider of online marketing technology and services for retail merchants, today announced first quarter aggregate performance results for retailers using the company’s full-service data feed marketing program Mercent Performance. For the period beginning January 1 and ending March 31, 2007, Mercent Performance customers recognized an average return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) of 914% through Cost-per-Click (CPC) shopping portals and comparison shopping engines. Retail merchants using Mercent’s stand-alone software platform, Mercent Retail, averaged 720% ROAS. The equivalent average percentage of sales for Mercent Performance and Mercent Retail customers were 10.9% and 13.9% respectively. Overall, average Q1 2007 ROAS for Mercent customers increased 129% compared with Q3 2006, the previous non-holiday quarter.

According to the State of Retailing Online 2006 study published by Forrester Research and Shop.org, the retail industry average ROAS for comparison-shopping engines (including holiday sales) is 370%. Based on this metric, Mercent Performance and Mercent Retail customers respectively achieve 247% and 195% of the industry average.

Mercent customer performance gains are attributable to increased product visibility through the expanding list of Mercent-supported channels. Mercent increases ad spend efficiency by applying proprietary technology and services to optimize channel mix, CPC bids, product attributes, assortments, categorization and merchandising content.

"Mercent helps Music123.com achieve industry-leading ROAS targets while increasing online revenues," said Cory Nielsen, Internet Marketing Manager at Woodwind and Brasswind.

Mercent Retail is a hosted performance marketing platform that provides a single point of integration between existing retail management systems and online shopping channels. The Mercent Retail platform provides tools to automate, measure and optimize merchandising campaigns. Mercent Retail helps merchants increase revenue and gross margins by promoting the right products with the right offers in the right online channels. The software service may be purchased stand-alone or as part of Mercent’s full-service performance marketing solution, Mercent Performance.

Mercent Performance provides online merchants a full-service, outsourced solution for shopping feed optimization capitalizing on Mercent’s industry-leading technology. With Mercent Performance, merchants realize lower management overhead and reduced ongoing reliance on IT resources to implement dynamic online promotional campaigns through shopping portals.

Mercent delivers optimized product attributes and merchandising offers to consumers through online retail channels. Shopping feed data is more consistent with the merchant’s e-commerce storefront, more accurate and timely due to automation, and more effective at converting online visitors into shoppers. Mercent acts as a proactive channel advisor to brand-conscious retail merchants, delivering differentiated shopping channel intelligence that increases online retail performance. To align its interests with customer success, Mercent offers both Mercent Retail and Mercent Performance through a pay-for-performance pricing model.

Retail merchants can visit Booth #926 at Internet Retailer 2007 Conference & Exhibition June 4 – 7 in San Jose, CA to learn more about Mercent Retail with TrueAttribute™ technology and Mercent Performance shopping feed optimization services.

Information regarding Mercent Retail is available at www.mercent.com/retail.

Information regarding Mercent Performance is available at www.mercent.com/performance.

The complete list of online marketing channels supported by Mercent Performance is available at www.mercent.com/channels.

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.

For the latest Mercent news, visit www.mercent.com/news.

Mercent PR Contact
Kristine Szarkowitz
press@mercent.com
Tel: 206-832-3900