PRESS RELEASES

Mercado Advances the Online Experience through Product Discovery, Shopping and Merchandising Innovations

New Mercado Ignition OnDemand™ storefront interface introduced at Internet Retailer 2008 – Ignition Charter Program retailers to launch in August.

Chicago, IL, June 10, 2008 - Today at the 2008 Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition, Mercado announced the latest release of its on-demand eCommerce suite. Mercado Ignition OnDemand™ enables online retailers to provide unprecedented levels of shopper engagement, while delivering powerful, conversion-boosting merchandising capabilities.

Mercado Ignition OnDemand offers innovative, shopper-centric merchandising solutions that empower emerging and aggressively growing online businesses to conquer the toughest customer attraction, conversion and retention challenges. With this release Mercado debuts its new storefront interface, which offers an intuitive and engaging shopping experience that takes full advantage of the company's proven search and merchandising solution – used by many of today's leaders in online retailing.

"Mercado Ignition OnDemand's new storefront features take product discovery and merchandising to new heights," said Corey Leibow, President and CEO of Mercado. "It's the only eCommerce software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution built on the principle that the success of the online retailer is dependent on creating powerful connections between shoppers and products. With the addition of this shopping front-end to our proven searchandising solution, we're offering powerful pre-integrated product navigation and merchandising capabilities, and incorporating the latest Web 2.0 navigation in a single-page shopping experience."

Mercado is demonstrating the final beta of Mercado Ignition OnDemand at this year's Internet Retailer show, and will launch its Ignition Charter Program (ICP) customers starting in August – in preparation for the 08 Holiday Season. Charter Program customers will receive introductory and Holiday Readiness merchandising training as part of their rollout. Online retail customers such as home organization retailer Organize.com (no. 453 on the Internet Retailer Top 500 list) will be able to take advantage of the latest product discovery and shopping experience advances such as:

Ajax-based product navigation and sorting features such as product hover details, graphical color pickers, price sliders and an intuitive Product Picker™
Multiple wishlist creation and easy product comparison features
Out-the-box merchandising zones such as 'best sellers', 'recommended products' and 'new arrivals'
Rich media optimization and management of merchandising assets such as banners and images
Pre-integrated ratings & reviews and social shopping features
Intuitive Seller Wizard for customizing storefront features, layout and look & feel
Automated product-level sitemap generation and flexible meta-data features for better search engine optimization (SEO)
Pre-configured analytics tagging
Checkout and integration with leading payment systems

"It's a constant challenge allocating time and money to investigate Web technologies and implement them into our eCommerce site," commented Kevin Watts, Director of eCommerce at Organize.com. "Mercado's new Web storefront technology will make it easier for us to integrate the latest technologies through a pre-built application. We will be able to incorporate product reviews, Web 2.0 innovations, and a powerful search, navigation and merchandising solution for our various micro-sites."

Social Shopping

Retailers are increasingly realizing the power of their shoppers to shape their business. Reviews and ratings have become a vital part of retailers' online merchandising strategies and are proving to add significant bottom-line value. By integrating the PowerReviews ratings and reviews solution into Mercado Ignition OnDemand, Mercado puts social shopping to work selling.

"Shoppers are much more likely to buy online when they have the tools to make confident and informed decisions. Our tag-based solution helps shoppers to identify with products based not on pre-defined terms, but on highly personalized notions like 'comfortable' or 'easy to assemble'," said Andy Chen, CEO of PowerReviews. "Providing shoppers with real, off-the-shelf product feedback and insight within Mercado's new shopping environment promises to give online retailers a real edge when it comes to competing in the Web 2.0 eCommerce world."

Mercado Ignition OnDemand is designed to make it easy for emerging online retailers to go to market quickly with an engaging, contemporary and competitive shopping experience – while taking advantage of proven merchandising and leading, pre-integrated reviews and ratings, analytics and rich media. Mercado will soon make further announcements regarding partner integrations.

"For the last decade, Mercado has been successfully working to provide more marketing power, more merchandising features and more selling capabilities for online retailers," added Leibow. "By integrating Web 2.0 and community/social networking tools with our best-in-class site search and refinement capabilities, Mercado is not only making shopping more rewarding and efficient, but also much more engaging."

"Mercado Ignition OnDemand should be extremely attractive for retailers who want to quickly upgrade their shopping experience," commented Susan Aldrich, SVP and Consultant at the Patricia Seybold Group. "Given that the solution is offered as a SaaS, I view it as a very compelling option in a tough economic year."

In the coming weeks Mercado will also announce significant enhancements to Mercado Ignition™, the company's customizable licensed software solution – which is built to meet the site search and navigation performance requirements and complex merchandising needs of large pure-play Internet and multi-channel online retailers.

Interested Internet retailers who would like learn more, or receive information on joining Mercado's Ignition Charter Program, should stop by booth #936 at the Internet Retailer show.

About Mercado

Mercado is a leading eCommerce solution provider, offering site search & navigation, merchandising and storefront solutions to more than 400 multi-channel, pure-play & SMB Internet retail and B2B eCommerce brands in the United States, Canada and Europe. Mercado enables a rich shopping experience and equips eCommerce professionals with a powerful platform on which to execute merchandising strategies and ignite revenue growth. As a result of deploying Mercado's software and on-demand solutions, online retailers commonly realize immediate and significant increases in both conversion rate and average order value (AOV). B&H Photo-Video, evogear.com, GUESS?, Inc., Macy's, OfficeMax, Organize.com, Overstock.com, REI, Ross-Simons, Sears Holdings Corp., Ted Baker, and Williams-Sonoma, Inc. are some of the online businesses who have partnered with Mercado.