Mercent Expands SaaS Application Suite, Integrates Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwire - September 15, 2008) - SHOP.ORG ANNUAL SUMMIT -- Mercent™, a provider of online marketing technology and services for retail merchants, today announced the launch of Mercent Retail™ with integrated data logging and reporting built upon the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) from Amazon Web Services. Mercent's on-demand managed services help retail marketers increase the performance of online product advertising campaigns.

"Amazon Web Services helps Mercent provide our retail merchants with a reliable and scalable SaaS offering while minimizing IT operating costs," said Chadwick Hill, Mercent Director of IT Operations. "By securely offloading historical advertising campaign data to Amazon S3, Mercent offers clients and our in-house performance marketing team faster, more efficient campaign performance reporting."

Mercent's cloud computing efforts have helped the company scale to accommodate explosive growth and seasonal spikes in ad campaign data volumes. In the past two years, the number of product ads published by Mercent on behalf of its retail clients increased by more than 4300%.

The latest release of Mercent's on-demand platform, Mercent Retail, asynchronously writes campaign data to Amazon S3 to ensure high data availability and scalability. Mercent collects, then locally queues and processes campaign data before writing the data to Amazon S3 for long-term storage. Data migration to and from Amazon S3 is handled automatically as a background process, significantly reducing application processing overhead and storage infrastructure requirements. All data is encrypted during transfer and storage to prevent unauthorized data access and ensure data security. Application response times to end-user data requests against Amazon S3 are equal or better than those processed locally under the previous architecture.

"We are pleased to see Mercent utilize Amazon web services to bring their merchants the scalable and highly available web infrastructure that they require," said Steve Rabuchin, Director of Developer Relations and Business Development for Amazon Web Services.

Mercent is a market leader in responding to trends in the retail industry, and continually updates its on-demand retail marketing services to meet the evolving needs of web-based retailers. Leading retailers including 1-800-Flowers, Bass Pro Shops, GUESS?, REI, and Redcats Group trust Mercent to generate more revenues, profits, ROAS, and customer lifetime value from cross-channel online marketing campaigns. Mercent clients benefit with each new release of Mercent Retail.

Information regarding Mercent Retail shopping feed and paid inclusion management technology, Mercent Performance marketing services, and the complete list of online marketing channels in the Mercent Shopping Network is available at www.mercent.com.

Please visit Mercent at booth 214 at the Shop.org Annual Summit 2008, September 15 - 17 at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, NV.

About Mercent

Mercent provides online marketing technology and services to help retail merchants optimize performance across online marketing channels. Mercent's on-demand platform, Mercent Retail, connects existing retail management systems and The Mercent Shopping Network, a network of more than 50 online shopping destinations including transactional marketplaces such as Amazon.com and SHOP.COM, comparison shopping engines (CSEs) such as Shopping.com and Shopzilla, paid inclusion programs like Yahoo! Search Submit Pro, and affiliate marketing programs such as LinkShare and Performics. Mercent Retail makes it easy for merchants to increase revenue and gross margins by promoting the right products with the right merchandising offers and placement using optimized product data feeds to these key retail channels. Mercent customers include 1-800-Flowers, Bass Pro Shops, Benefit Cosmetics, Celebrate Express, GUESS?, Levenger, Redcats Group, REI, and other leading retailers. Mercent is an Amazon.com Certified System Integrator, Buy.com Gold Certified Partner, SHOP.COM Certified Data Feed Provider, certified Google Product Search Partner and Yahoo! Search Submit Pro certified feed provider. Founded by veterans of Amazon.com, Mercent is a venture-funded company based in Seattle, WA. For more information, visit www.mercent.com.