Retailers See New Opportunity in High-Growth Social Shopping; Mercent Launches eCommerce Tools for Facebook, Twitter, and More

SEATTLE, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Mercent™, an award-winning provider of on-demand marketing solutions for retailers, announced today the launch of Mercent Retail Social™ - the industry's first and only online channel management platform to syndicate retail product and merchandising data to the Internet's most popular social media outlets, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Ning and BeBo.

Mercent Retail Social is a complete social shopping service specifically developed for retailers based on the Mercent Retail™ online channel management platform.  With Mercent Retail Social, online retailers can expand customer outreach to market and sell to millions of consumers communicating and buying through an extensive network of social shopping sites.  

According to Eric Best, CEO of Mercent, "At Mercent, we are committed to our retail clients' eCommerce success and continually look for new and innovative ways to advance Mercent's technology and services to add substantial value to our merchants' online sales programs.  Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook are gaining rapid consumer adoption and represent a critical channel for retail shopper engagement.  Through Mercent Retail Social we expect Mercent clients to engage and sell to an even broader demographic of online shoppers to further drive their eCommerce sales growth and profits."

According to research analyst firm Forrester Research, "More and more companies are embracing social media networking as a marketing strategy to boost eCommerce sales."  Mercent has already launched Mercent Retail Social with various clients including Teavana – one of the largest specialty tea retailers selling online.  

"We are always on the lookout for dynamic services like Mercent Retail Social that benefit our customers," commented Jay Allen, VP of eCommerce at Teavana.  "There is tremendous sales and marketing power with this service.  In giving our consumers the ability to communicate and interact with other online shoppers about Teavana and its products it not only promotes sales generation, it provides critical information about existing and potential customers that can help us become much more effective in our overall sales and marketing efforts."

Mercent's new offering is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution with value-add services for high volume, branded merchants with large product catalogs.   This includes seamless and unified data feed integration with a private-label social storefront on each social network; delivery of rich product descriptions, product categorization data, promotional offers and updates which reflect real-time changes occurring on the retailer's own eCommerce website; full content and merchandising through lists; and search engine optimization capabilities.  Mercent Retail Social also allow retailers to customize and brand each social storefront; automatically includes storefronts on Facebook's 'shop' tab; automatically posts and pushes Twitter 'tweets' and updates to reflect time-sensitive offers and product status to shoppers; allows consumer comments, rating and sharing capabilities; and delivers reporting and analytics to reveal buyer activity.  Mercent Retail Social is powered by Wishpot – a social shopping service provider that specializes in social media applications, sites and storefronts.  

"We are thrilled to be working closely with Mercent," commented Max Ciccosoto, Co-founder and CEO of Wishpot.  "Mercent serves a sophisticated and highly innovative retail client portfolio leveraging emerging channels like social shopping.  Together, Mercent and Wishpot offer cost-effective, high-impact brand and sales exposure for leading merchants."

For virtually every consumer, social engagement has always been a natural part of the shopping experience.  Today, shoppers look to the power of popular social media tools to share and receive opinions, recommendations, news and information on everything shopping-related. Shoppers exchange personal brand recommendations, timely news on product prices and promotions, seller reliability, and even post-sale customer experience.  

Mercent Retail Social is now available to all online retailers, and is natively available to Mercent Retail clients as a turnkey optional service. Additional information on this product,  Mercent's Retail shopping feed management technology, Mercent Performance marketing services, and the complete list of online marketing channels in the Mercent Shopping Network are available at www.mercent.com or by contacting Mercent sales at 206.832.3924.

About Mercent Retail

Mercent Retail is on-demand, online advertising and shopping channel management platform software exclusively for retailers. The solution gives merchants the power to reach more than 250 million customers with targeted products, advertisements and promotions through the most popular online marketing channels. A proven and industry-leading platform, Mercent Retail offers seamless integration with back-end retail e-commerce systems and turnkey data integration with analytics and paid search platforms to give retailers campaign intelligence and the power to change product promotions and offers 'on-the-fly'. Most important, the SAAS platform makes it easy and cost-effective for merchants to increase sales revenue, improve gross margins and optimize their return on advertising spend by promoting and selling the right products with the right merchandising offers on key retail channels.

Mercent Retail helps the world's leading online retailers promote their products across online transactional marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. The technology handles the complex and unique challenges of managing multiple data feed exchanges, and is ideally suited for connecting retail systems with sophisticated online marketplace and comparison shopping APIs. Mercent Retail also addresses the correct mapping of products, automates order processing, and provides ongoing data feed monitoring to rapidly and efficiently grow marketplace revenues.

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 and 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.

SOURCE Mercent