Adding products to shopping search engines and popular e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon is becoming an increasingly popular strategy for online merchants to find new customers. Yet for the even large e-tailers, hooking up with those shopping sites often proves time-consuming and confusing -- fortunately, that's where Mercent comes in.
Seattle-based Mercent's Commerce System serves as an integration point for hooking your online catalog or inventory software to the major shopping search engines -- including Froogle, Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, and others -- in addition to Amazon.com.
"There are 115 million monthly shoppers that are visiting these online marketplaces and through a single point of integration -- our software product -- we can provide access to those shoppers," Mercent Chief Executive Eric Best said.
Mercent Commerce System is able to syndicate listings from several popular product catalogs -- both hosted versions or software-based catalogs. It also supports integration with larger enterprise-class or inventory management systems.
Although most shopping engines and marketplaces already offer means by which a third-party merchant can add their listings, it's often a difficult route. But according to Best, Mercent Commerce System can be up and running and syndicating product catalog listings in as little as 30 minutes.
"Our focus is really on reducing the cost and time to integrate with these marketplaces, and ultimately to reduce the ongoing cost of maintaining a relationship with these marketplaces and improving the relationship over time."
Mercent, indeed, has close relationships with many of the online shopping search engines. That's particularly true for Amazon.com, where Best worked after selling his startup to the e-commerce giant.
"Customers come to us and have ... a number of challenges," Best said. For instance, "they are just looking at Amazon for the first time as a partner for customer acquisition and online selling and now suddenly, they're facing this daunting integration task that we can make much easier."
"Once a connection is made [to the search engines], we handle the business rules around each of the different feeds," he added. "Amazon in particular has a pretty sophisticated platform," Best said. "We manage ... order data to send up to Amazon, as well as scheduling, and we log all transactions that go between the retailers and marketplace partners."
Mercent also enables e-commerce sellers to manage their products' listings on the search engines. Merchants can tweak product price points, search keywords and descriptions, product categories, and more.
In addition to Commerce System's core integration and management features, Mercent also provides value-added services such as optimizing merchants' storefronts and product landing pages tailored to the search engines.
"When you talk about the functionality that the software itself provides, we tend to take away a lot of the complexity that you'd normally associate with data feeds that a retailer's exchanging with these e-marketplace partners," Best said.
Of interest to tech-savvy merchants and developers, Mercent also supports Web services connections to the marketplaces. It also offers adapters for other e-commerce tools that an online seller might be running.
Christopher Saunders is managing editor of eCommerce-Guide.com.
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