To Meet the Demands of Holiday Shoppers, Merchants Can Now Offer e-Gift Cards and Wish List on Their Storefronts With the Launch of ProStores 10.1

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- ProStores, a full-featured customizable ecommerce solution for small- and medium-sized businesses, today announced a new version of its online store application - ProStores 10.1. ProStores 10.1 offers great new features just in time for the holiday shopping season to drive more sales, attract new customers, and improve the online shopping experience by putting more flexibility in the hands of the buyer.

Key highlights of the release are the e-Gift Cards and Wish List features. The e-Gift Cards feature helps merchants grow their customer base and generate repeat purchases and e-Gift Cards make great holiday gifts that help spread the word about a merchant's store. With Wish List, customers can create a list of items they want and share it with their friends and family. "Both features are designed to help merchants close sales and acquire new customers during the holiday shopping season," says Lin Shearer, head of marketing and revenue for ProStores. ProStores is also working with Clickable to help merchants optimize their online advertising efforts so that they stand out during the highly competitive holiday season.

ProStores 10.1 new features:  

• e-Gift Cards: e-Gift Cards are an effective way for merchants to promote their business and capture sales that otherwise might have been lost. Offering e-Gift Cards on a storefront will expand customers' purchasing options during the holidays and create a new source of sales. Since recipients of the e-Gift Card must visit the store to redeem their cards, merchants have an opportunity to generate repeat traffic. Additionally, the e-Gift Cards recipients will be exposed to a merchant's product offering, giving the merchant a great opportunity to grow their customer base. Offering e-Gift Cards on a web store can be key to driving more sales during the holiday season and beyond.

• Wish List: The Wish List feature allows shoppers to create a list of items they want from a merchant's store and send it to their friends and family. Wish List also helps customers store information for the products they may want to purchase in the future, eliminating the time and frustration it would take them to search for the items again when returning to the merchant's site. Merchants can observe and analyze customers' wish lists to identify and promote items from their inventory. Wish List will also help merchants generate repeat and new traffic and get the opportunity to up-sell cross-sell to increase average order size.

ProStores 10.1 - plus a new offer from Clickable - also help raise visibility of a merchant's online store:

• Special Offer from Clickable: Merchants can save time this holiday season by managing all of their search marketing campaigns - on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Facebook - from one convenient location with Clickable. ProStores merchants get a free trial on handy Clickable products such as the Clickable Pro Tool and Clickable Expert Team services, plus tips on optimizing campaigns to get the most out of their paid search dollars. "For merchants new to online advertising, Clickable can create a complete, custom solution to get started and ensure long-term success. For those already managing online advertising campaigns, Clickable can help merchants expand to all major search advertising networks and Facebook, and optimize their performance - all in less time," states Shearer.

• eBay Integration Enhancement: Latest integration makes it even easier for merchants to list items on eBay and improves their chances of matching items in certain categories to the eBay catalog - resulting in higher search results for their items. Better search results can mean more traffic and potentially more sales, especially during the holiday season.

• Shipping Enhancement - UPS Discount: Merchants who have account-based negotiated discount rates with UPS can now take advantage of those rates on their ProStores web store, thereby reducing their overall shipping costs. Merchants can also pass on the savings to their customers by offering discounted shipping during the holidays - making it a great promotional vehicle to drive more sales.

About ProStores

ProStores, an eBay Company, allows small- and medium-sized businesses to create professional online stores, customized with their own branding and domain name. ProStores was incorporated as an eBay Company in November 2004, followed by eBay's acquisition of Kurant's StoreSense technology in January 2005. ProStores launched its full-service ecommerce solution to merchants in June 2005. For more information about ProStores, visit http://www.prostores.com.

About eBay Inc.

Founded in 1995, eBay Inc. connects hundreds of millions of people around the world every day, empowering them to explore new opportunities and innovate together. eBay Inc. does this by providing the Internet platforms of choice for global commerce, payments and communications. Since its inception, eBay Inc. has expanded to include some of the strongest brands in the world, including eBay, PayPal, Skype, StubHub, Shopping.com and others. eBay Inc. is headquartered in San Jose, California.

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SOURCE ProStores