Blair, Frontgate, Hallmark, Ritz Interactive and Smith & Hawken Among 100+ to Renew and Join
MONTEREY, Calif., Aug. 10 -- SHOP.COM, an online marketplace, today announced that in the beginning of 2004, 145 new contracts and renewed agreements were signed with name brand retailers, e-tailers and catalogers. With the addition of new merchants such as Hallmark, Ritz Interactive and AutoAccessories4Less as well as renewed contracts with Pacific Sunwear, Cooking.com, Smith & Hawken and Frontgate, among others, SHOP.COM now offers the most comprehensive selection of branded products available for purchase at a single location.
SHOP.COM enables shoppers to search, find and buy from among multiple merchants and place their purchases in one shopping cart for easy check out. Unlike other online merchant aggregators, SHOP.COM gives full presence to the merchant`s own brand during the buying process and allows the merchants to bill the customers directly as well as manage the ongoing relationships.
"SHOP.COM helps us achieve incremental sales and attract new customers, and their cost-per-order business model is highly cost effective," said Jeff Parnell VP of Marketing Blair Corporation (AMEX:BL) , (www.blair.com). "Moreover, since SHOP.COM not only delivers us orders but also hands off the entire customer relationship, we`re able to cultivate the lifetime value for ourselves by integrating Blair`s customer service capabilities and expertise. They`re an excellent marketing resource for us." New Merchant Growth .
Owned and operated by privately-held Altura International, SHOP.COM organizes more than 1.5 million products from 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. With its proprietary OneCart(TM) technology, SHOP.COM enables consumers to manage their online shopping activity and history via a single personal shopping identity.
"At SHOP.COM, we`re the merchant`s ally -- we put merchants in direct contact with their new customers and then let the merchants manage and measure the ongoing relationships. It`s one of the reasons that we continue to attract and retain such high caliber merchants," said Lee Lorenzen, CEO Altura International.
ABOUT SHOP.COM
SHOP.COM is a marketplace that provides consumers with the most comprehensive selection of branded products available for purchase in a single site. SHOP.COM makes it easy for consumers to shop across more than 500 merchants in virtually every product category offering over 1.5 million products. Altura took full control of SHOP.COM in late 2003, and quickly transitioned this unforgettable URL into a premiere destination shopping portal that literally organizes all of commerce -- catalogers, retailers and e-tailers -- in a single location.
ABOUT ALTURA
Founded in September 1997, with investors including Bill Gates, Yahoo! and Amazon.com, Altura International has developed and hosts dozens of custom private malls for leading companies such as Gifts.com for Readers` Digest and closed-community organizations including Quixtar, MarketAmerica and BP Mall, as well as house-brand malls CatalogCity.com, AllTheMalls.com, among others, and its premiere shopping destination site, SHOP.COM. Altura`s proprietary technology is the Altura Merchant Operating System ("AMOS"), the result of nearly a decade of research and development, which allows Altura to power shopping sites in seven languages and 128 currencies, making it arguably the most robust e-commerce platform in the world. Additionally, as the only multi-vendor, multi-lingual and multi-currency e-commerce shopping engine, AMOS fully supports global shopping access as well. Altura International is a privately held company and is headquartered in Monterey, CA. More information can be found by visiting the company`s Web sites at www.altura.com and www.shop.com.
CONTACT:
Lauren Ames of AmesNorman
+1-650-327-9291
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