PRESS RELEASES
Mercado Gains Terrific Momentum in E-Commerce Market – More than Doubling Customer Base and Expanding Existing Customer Solutions
Today's fastest growing e-commerce innovators are rapidly adopting Mercado's search & navigation and advanced merchandising solution to accelerate online sales
CHICAGO, IL, June 6, 2006 - Mercado Software, the leading provider of e-commerce search & merchandising solutions, announced today at Internet Retailer 2006, a more than 100% increase in its installed base in the last 12 months. As a result of the company's continued expansion of its product offering and value-added services that address diverse e-commerce needs, more and more businesses are turning to Mercado to help them actively sell on their e-commerce sites.
"Mercado gained terrific momentum in 2005, with second-half customer acquisition double that of the first half, and something like 65% increase in install base for the year for the CSN search product," according to Susan Aldrich, SVP at the Patricia Seybold Group. "We expect great things of Mercado this year."
"This past year has been an incredible time for our company," said Corey J. Leibow, President and CEO of Mercado. "In addition to introducing several new products in the past year that have garnered extraordinarily positive reactions, we are consistently winning against our competition in all market categories. Some of the companies who have recently chosen to partner with Mercado include: Recreation Equipment Inc. (REI); B&H Photo-Video; Charming Shoppes, Inc.; Guess? Inc.; Costume Universe; Hancock Fabrics; OfficeMax®; Boy Scouts of America; Delightful Deliveries; The Inside Store; Organize.com; Broadspan Commerce; NAC Marketing; JDV Online; Onlineshoes.com; Vitamin Research Products; DEMCO; and SiteStuff – many of whom were using e-commerce search offerings from other vendors in our space and chose to move to Mercado."
In addition to continuing to add new revenue-enhancing functionality to their existing suite of search, navigation and site merchandising solutions, Mercado has introduced two new solutions that have expanded their offering into two new e-commerce sub-markets:
E-Commerce Search & Merchandising Software as a Service (SaaS)
Developed for new and rapidly growing online businesses, Mercado bFIRST™ is the industry's most fully featured suite of on-demand e-commerce search, navigation and merchandising solutions. Mercado bFIRST is offered as a SaaS, enabling organizations to quickly leverage the best available search and merchandising tools and to accelerate revenue growth on their e-commerce sites.
After only one month using Mercado bFIRST, Organize.com increased revenue by 57%, items sold by 58%, and their number of orders by 60%. According to Kevin Watts, Director of E-Commerce at Organize.com, "Going live with Mercado bFIRST has significantly improved our search functionality. Our customers are now experiencing much better results and our marketing team can now easily update our product information every day. Mercado's strong merchandising and reporting tools enable us to see what is going on with our e-commerce search and sales results. And it is not rocket science – anyone on our team can use the Mercado solution to make changes and updates to the search parameters."
Business-to-Business E-Commerce Solutions
Mercado also recently launched Mercado bSMART™ for B2B e-commerce sites. Mercado bSMART helps product line, channel, and marketing managers to sell more effectively online to other businesses and through partners. Built on Mercado's industry-leading Commerce Search & Navigation (CSN) platform, Mercado bSMART provides online businesses with accurate product search and catalog navigation – enabling their customers and partner network, through an intuitive sourcing environment, to easily locate and purchase the products that best suit their needs.
Mercado bSMART's enhanced Commerce Management features include the ability to create custom catalogs for the "power buyer" who knows specifically what he or she is looking for and buys it repeatedly – in accordance with company contracts, and/or with his or her specific role within the company.
Enriching Product Data with Mercado UniClass™ Mercado also launched Mercado UniClass, its attribute extraction and categorization solution designed to cleanse complex sets of product data and provide uniformity to large catalogs. According to Blake Moritz, vice president of E-Commerce IT for OfficeMax, "UniClass is capable of mining product information for descriptive gems that can be used to make search more accurate and build more intuitive categories – this will be good for our business because it will help our customers better find what they're looking for."
Technology Innovation and Partner Approach Fueling Momentum
"It's more than just our great technology," adds Leibow. "Our customers consistently tell us they selected Mercado because of our practice of working side-by-side with them to ensure success, combined with our industry-leading technology and our focus on e-commerce. We've had a great 2006 so far. Not only are we welcoming many new customers, but we're also helping existing customers – including those identified by Internet Retailer as the fastest growing and segment-leading e-commerce companies – to increase the value of their Mercado solution by expanding the scope and richness of their solution. We're extremely excited about helping our customers to kick butt this year – and in the years to come!"
About Mercado Software
Mercado is a leading provider of e-commerce search & merchandising solutions for multi-channel retail and B2B organizations. By enabling a superior buying experience and equipping business managers with a powerful platform on which to execute merchandising strategies, online businesses can aggressively grow revenue and foster customer loyalty. Sears, Williams-Sonoma, JCPenney, Macy's, Target, Tower Records, MSN, Caterpillar and OfficeMax, are some of the companies benefiting from Mercado solutions. For more information about Mercado Software, please visit www.mercado.com or call (888) 376-1400.
Media Contact:
Mark Shapiro
858-573-0736
mshapiro@davismarrin.com
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