SHOP.COM Launches OneCart™ Mall of the Web
Largest Selection of Catalogers, Retailers, and e-Tailers
Available in One Location
MONTEREY, Calif., April 20, 2004 — SHOP.COM, an online marketplace, today announced the most comprehensive selection of merchants and products available on the Web via OneCart™ - a single shopping experience. Within SHOP.COM, consumers can now search, find and buy virtually any product they desire in one location. Owned and operated by privately-held Altura International, SHOP.COM organizes more than 20,000 catalogers, 475,000 retailers, 40,000 malls, and 300,000 e-Tailers, and syndicates that content for consumers around the world via customized malls in seven languages -- U.S. English, U.K. English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese. SHOP.COM is the flagship mall of the Altura Network of Malls which features dozens of sites including Amazon.com, CatalogCity.com, gifts.com, shopping.com, Quixtar and Froogle, among others.
Search, Find and Obtain (SFO) has been cited among industry analysts as the next "killer app" of the Internet and the technology that will usher in a new level of e-commerce activity. Unlike other aggregators and shopping comparison sites which force consumers to link off, register and check out at multiple locations to execute their purchases, SHOP.COM allows consumers to search, find and obtain their favorite products from among trusted merchants in a single, easy-to-use site.
"We have been affiliated with the Altura Network of Malls for four years. The customers we acquire from their network are among the most web-savvy of consumers, buying more items frequently in a single check-out." said Roger Bensinger, Senior Vice President of Marketing for The Sharper Image. "We think this relationship is consistent with our customer`s interest in making shopping not only efficient and easy, but innovative as well. Raising brand awareness for the network with the SHOP.COM URL is a natural progression for Altura and should drive a new and larger set of consumers to their unique services- and ultimately to The Sharper Image."
“As a former owner of several consumer catalogs, I appreciate how quickly and easily Altura and its Altura Merchant Operating System led the catalog industry to the Internet, said Bill Nicolai, Senior Consulting Partner, LENSER a consultancy which provides strategic technical marketing assistance for a wide array of catalog/Internet retailers. “Today, I applaud Altura’s move to organize more of commerce for consumers utilizing the SHOP.COM URL, its OneCart shopping capabilities and their eGift and CareCode services. Consumers can now more easily shop the catalogers, retailers and e-tailers they trust with a single check-out. What could be easier? ”
“Over the years we’ve learned that authoritative selection – whether it’s for researching information, making travel arrangements or shopping for products -- is key to winning on the Web,” said Lee Lorenzen, CEO of Altura International. “SHOP.COM is the only site that is successfully organizing all of shopping for consumers. Our OneCart technology makes the search, find and buy process easy and convenient.”
Unique Consumer Services
Because SHOP.COM hosts the most authoritative selection of commerce available today, the company can offer one-of-a-kind shopping services that leverage its OneCart platform for multiple merchants. For example, to make gift-giving easier, SHOP.COM provides a unique service called eGiftTM which enables consumers to create a gift-email for a particular recipient that offers several gift choices from an array of merchants. Great for people who live far away, are difficult to buy for or would like more than a traditional gift certificate, an eGift lets the recipient select the gift he or she prefers from among the gift options. After choosing their favorite item, the recipient also provides specific information such as size, color and other product preferences in addition to the shipping address.
To reward loyal customers and benefit a consumer’s chosen charity, school, or non-profit organization, SHOP.COM also established the CareCodeTM Fundraising Service. By choosing an existing CareCode or creating a unique CareCode for a favorite cause, consumers can designate a portion of the value of every purchase they make on SHOP.COM to a cause of their choice.
SHOP.COM’s Gift Center also recommends gift ideas according to interest, recipient and even occasion. Additional features include a Date Reminder to notify consumers in advance of their important events as well as a Gift Registry for consumers who want to create their own wish list and notify others.
Convenient Search Options
With nearly a decade of research and development, SHOP.COM also offers consumers a variety of easy-to-use search options that enable them to quickly find a product by category or keyword and locate a store by name or location. Millions of products are organized into categories to allow consumers to easily browse groups of similar products and find the product at the price that best suits their need. With Product Search, consumers can enter a product name, key word, brand, description or category and shop from among 1.5 million products organized for quick comparison and easy purchase. The Stores A-Z Service alphabetizes the more than 600 stores available for the OneCart shopping experience making it easy to buy from merchants such as ashford.com, Casual Living, Coldwater Creek, Frontgate, Hammacher Schlemmer, Harry and David, OfficeMax, PacSun, RedEnvelope, The Sharper Image, Sports Authority, Sur La Table, and TrueValue.
With Catalog Finder, consumers can request print catalogs or browse pages from among thousands of catalogs, find 800-numbers, or link directly to Web sites. Using Store/Mall Finder, consumers can locate stores by typing in a ZIP code along with a store name. The e-Tailer Finder feature lets consumers link directly to any of the approximately 300,000 e-tailers with the click of a mouse.
ABOUT SHOP.COM
Altura took full control of SHOP.COM in late 2003, and quickly transitioned this unforgettable URL from a mere shopping portal to the site that literally organizes all of commerce – retailers, catalogers and e-tailers – in a single location. Providing consumers with authoritative selection, SHOP.COM is Altura’s flagship mall and the nucleus of the Altura Network. SHOP.COM offers consumers a state-of-the-art shopping experience that is the result of the Altura Merchant Operating System (“AMOS”). AMOS is a powerful and flexible e-commerce technology that powers the only shopping platform capable of organizing and supporting the world’s catalogers, retailers and e-Tailers in a single shopping environment. SHOP.COM’s CPO (cost-per-order) business model provides the merchant of record with both the complete customer relationship and a guaranteed profit on every order.
ABOUT ALTURA
Founded in September 1997, and partially funded by Bill Gates, Yahoo!, and Amazon.com, Altura International develops and hosts custom private label e-commerce shopping solutions for over 50 shopping sites including house brand malls such as SHOP.COM, CatalogCity.com and AllTheMalls.com, public malls for leading companies such as Gifts.com for Readers’ Digest and private malls for closed shopping communities such as MasterCard, Quixtar and MarketAmerica. Through SHOP.COM, Altura`s flagship shopping portal, consumers are provided easy access to the world`s best products from merchants they know and trust. Building on the strengths of its Altura Merchant Operating System (AMOS) technology and its marketing agreements with hundreds of top name brand merchants, Altura has established itself as the leading developer of e-commerce shopping solutions. Additionally, as the only multi-vendor, multi-lingual and multi-currency e-commerce shopping engine, AMOS fully supports global shopping access as well. Altura-powered malls are located at the most heavily trafficked Internet intersections and are designed to deliver the most satisfying remote shopping experiences for customers around the world. Altura International is a privately held company and is headquartered in Monterey, Calif. More information can be found by visiting the company`s Web sites at www.altura.com and www.shop.com.
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