GSI Commerce Inc. has acquired a small minority stake in Allurent Inc., a provider of rich Internet application technology for making web sites more interactive and user-friendly, the companies said today. GSI will integrate Allurent’s Rich Internet Commerce suite into its e-commerce platform, which powers the web sites of more than 50 retailers.
“Our current and prospective retail partners are interested in adding rich Internet applications to take online shopping to the next level for their customers,” said Fiona Dias, executive vice president of partner strategy and marketing for GSI. “Working with Allurent enables us to address this need with innovative products that are faster to deploy than custom-built solutions and that empower retailers to make compelling e-commerce and merchandising interactions a part of their core business strategy rather than as a one-off project.”
Allurent has also entered technology-sharing partnerships with several other e-commerce platform providers, including Demandware, N2N Commerce and Art Technology Group Inc. But GSI is the only technology partner that has acquired an equity stake in Cambridge, MA-based Allurent, whose primary financial backer is Boston-based venture capital firm Polaris Venture Partners, says Joe Chung, co-founder and CEO of Allurent. The companies did not disclose how large a stake GSI acquired or what it paid.
“Partnering with GSI will significantly accelerate the adoption of Allurent products,” Chung says. “Working together, we can enable GSI’s retailers to transform online shopping from what’s traditionally been a utilitarian activity into a fully branded, enticing shopping experience.”
Allurent works with Ajax and other Web 2.0 technologies to develop more feature-rich and engaging shopping experiences, such as through shopping carts that display multiple images without having to wait for a separate page to load.
Among the technologies Allurent is developing, Chung says, is a “super widget,” a software application that will sit on consumers’ desktops and let them click into a retailer’s entire catalog of product images. “This will provide a high-animation desktop experience,” Chung says. “It will be how online shopping would look like with extremely high bandwidth.”
Rob Garf, vice president and general manager of retail strategies at research and advisory firm AMR Research Inc., says the ability of the Allurent technology to configure custom applications will introduce a new element to GSI’s platform. “The configurable nature of the Allurent product goes against GSI’s one-size-fits-all approach,” Garf says. “GSI clients have been clamoring for more control of their e-commerce environment, so hopefully the combination of GSI and Allurent will enable that.”
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