Mercado Ignites A New Era Of eCommerce
Recently eTail West 2008, Mercado unveiled a new look and announced product plans that represent innovative, shopper-centric merchandising solutions for the "new eCommerce". Leveraging the synergies of its search and merchandising capabilities, the company has assembled and will soon launch a powerful eCommerce suite called Mercado Ignition. Mercado also plans to continue to build out eCommerce functionality throughout 2008 with innovations that enable online businesses to dramatically scale product offerings and accelerate the customer journey.
"We believe we're entering a new era of eCommerce. Although the Internet has removed the barriers to entry, there are still huge challenges," said Corey Leibow, President and CEO of Mercado. "Online retailers who figure out that they must engage shoppers with every interaction throughout their journey - and match that with a smart commerce data strategy - will realize their full business potential."
Mercado Ignition is a highly customizable eCommerce solution featuring what industry experts have referred to as the "most advanced merchandising interface", built on a proven site search and navigation platform - capable of delivering high performance, while scaling to millions of products. This year will see Mercado Ignition releases that enrich product discovery at two levels: by engaging shoppers at the front-end, and building and supporting deeper and richer back-end shopper/product connections.
In addition, building on previously announced Metrics Driven Merchandising and social shopping developments, over the next few months Mercado will announce deeper strategic relationships with leading Web analytics, reviews and rich media providers.
On-Demand eCommerce
Mercado anticipated the huge growth of SMB Internet retailing, launching the market's first on-demand "searchandising" solution 2 years ago. Today, there are more than 100 rapidly-growing online retailers on their software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Mercado has provided these businesses with the opportunity to push the online merchandising envelope, and realize big gains as a result.
"We believe this market is underserved. Some of our customers have seen 80 to 100 percent growth over the past couple of years; their needs are changing and they are quickly outgrowing their existing eCommerce solution," added Corey Leibow. "And they're not alone. There are thousands of emerging eCommerce businesses that are ready to move to a robust hosted solution that will take them to the next level, but can't because of prohibitive costs or technology barriers."
Mercado Ignition OnDemand is a complete hosted eCommerce solution that the company will launch in April. It features new storefront technology that takes product discovery and merchandising to new heights. Mercado Ignition OnDemand is the only eCommerce solution built on the principle that the success of the online retailer is dependent on creating powerful connections between shoppers and products. As such, it will expose powerful pre-integrated product navigation and merchandising capabilities, of which online retailers have not traditionally been able to take advantage without customization - nor in a hosted environment. Mercado Ignition OnDemand is configured as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, boasting the latest Web 2.0 navigation and a "single-page" shopping experience - built on the industry's leading search, navigation and merchandising technology.
"It makes sense that Mercado, a company that understands so deeply the role of search and merchandising in matching the shopper with the perfect product, would launch a new shopping interface," said Susan Aldrich, SVP and Sr. Analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group. "I see this as a natural extension to Mercado's strategy, and one that makes it easier for online shoppers to fast-track the Google to checkout experience - making repeat customers out of shoppers."
About Mercado
Mercado is a leading eCommerce solution provider, offering site search & navigation, merchandising and storefront solutions to more than 150 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 conversion rate and average order value (AOV) increases. Macy's, Ted Baker, Overstock.com, Blacks Leisure Group, Williams-Sonoma Inc., Sears Holdings Corp., OfficeMax, GUESS?, Inc., REI, and B&H Photo-Video are some of the online businesses who have partnered with Mercado.
SOURCE: Mercado