June 01 2007

Mercado merchandising for SMEs

Mercado has launched a new solution for small and mid-sized e-retail businesses and those which need to be up and selling quickly. Its "rapid-ROI search and navigation solution" Mercado Base is built on the company's e-commerce search and navigation platform "and provides the same quality of search, performance, and patented navigation used by many leading multi-channel retailing brands such as Macy's, Sears, GUESS?, REI, and Williams-Sonoma".

Press release follows:

Unlike free or non-eCommerce search solutions, Mercado Base offers extremely strong linguistic capabilities and retail industry thesauri, allowing Internet retailers to have effective search up and running immediately without the need for labor-intensive "query baking" or requiring the search system to learn over time. Mercado Base also boasts comprehensive and easy-to-use reporting, allowing business users to monitor and analyze search behavior, trends, and specific eCommerce metrics such as searches that result in shoppers being directed to departments or product categories.

"Industry experts concur that quality search is a must-have eCommerce feature, and has proven to dramatically increase conversion rates" said Corey Leibow, president and CEO of Mercado Software. "We're now working with a large number of SMB Internet retailers who have seen tremendous value in upgrading their search and navigation in terms of dollars and cents."

According to MarketingSherpa, 43% of visitors who land on a website go directly to the search function. And customers who use the search box on eCommerce sites convert at nearly three times the rates of general browsers. Additional Mercado Base features include:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment means no IT overhead

The industry's leading eCommerce search algorithm that offers an optimized blend of exact matches and associations

Highly relevant search, browse and navigation results and rankings, offering relevancy thresholds/overrides; leverages content data structure to maximize matching

20+ industry out-of-the-box domain dictionaries

Dynamically generated navigational paths, including refinements based on attributes and smart classification

Breadcrumb trail of user activity within site creates stickiness - reduces abandonment

Recommendations for optimal SEM term bidding

"Mercado Base offers an ideal starting point for Internet retailers who want to deploy rich searchandising features down the road," adds Leibow. "We uniquely offer an easy migration path for clients wishing to add more sophisticated merchandising features, or who are increasing the size and complexity of their online offering." Mercado Base is available immediately and is offered on a monthly subscription basis. Mercado offers attractive migration pricing for customers wishing to upgrade to its complete hosted or on-premise merchandising suite.

Emma Herrod