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

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 control 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 is available at www.mercent.com/channels

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 more than 35 leading online marketing channels including transactional marketplaces such as Amazon.com and SHOP.COM, shopping portals such as Shopping.com and Shopzilla, 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 REI, GUESS?, Celebrate Express, Crabtree & Evelyn, Levenger, The Right Start and other leading retailers. Mercent is an Amazon.com Certified System Integrator and SHOP.COM Certified Data Feed Provider. 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