Las Vegas, NV — September 12, 2005 — Mercent, the single solution for online retail merchandising, today announced that Celebrate Express (Nasdaq: BDAY), has selected Mercent Retail to maximize online sales, profits, and merchandising control through leading online marketing channels. Celebrate Express is a leading online and catalog retailer of celebration products serving families with young children.

“We were looking for a new level of visibility, control and sales performance from our online marketing channels,” said Jeff Nienaber, Online Marketing Manager at Celebrate Express. “Mercent Retail gives us a competitive advantage in that we can reach millions of new customers while preserving and extending our brand.”

Mercent Retail, an on-demand software service, enables marketing managers to automate sophisticated merchandising campaigns for specific product assortments across online channels. Because Mercent Retail integrates with existing back-end retail systems, managers can make smarter online marketing decisions informed by back-end operational metrics including product inventory, cost of goods sold and gross margin. Mercent Retail automates the scheduling, orchestration, translation and transportation of product, inventory, order, referral, conversion and financial settlement data for every SKU in the assortment and each assigned marketing channel. The platform scales to support millions of online product SKUs, referrals, conversions and orders.

“We are delighted to partner with Celebrate Express to help expand their customer base online,” said Eric Best, CEO of Mercent. “Our goal is to make it easy for Celebrate Express to increase revenue and gross margins while maintaining the continuity of their customers’ shopping experience.”

Mercent Retail provides maximum product visibility across 20 online marketing channels including Amazon.com, AOL inStore, Become.com, BizRate.com, CatalogCity.com, CNET Shopper.com, Commission Junction, Epinions, Froogle, LinkShare, MSN Shopping, mySimon.com, NexTag, PriceGrabber.com, PriceRunner, SHOP.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Smarter.com, and Yahoo! Shopping.

About Celebrate Express, Inc.
Celebrate Express is a leading online retailer of celebration products serving families with young children. The company currently operates three brands: Birthday Express, which markets children's party products; Storybook Heirlooms, which offers girls' special occasion apparel and accessories; and Costume Express, which markets children's costumes and accessories. The company utilizes its branded websites, BirthdayExpress.com, Storybook.com and CostumeExpress.com, complemented by branded catalogs to offer products as complete coordinated solutions. The company's goal is to help busy parents celebrate the special moments in their children's lives. For more information, please visit CelebrateExpress.com.

About Mercent
Founded by veterans of Amazon.com, Mercent is the single solution for online retail merchandising. Mercent’s on-demand platform, Mercent Retail, helps merchants increase revenue and gross margins by promoting the right products with the right offers in the right online marketing channels. Mercent Retail provides a single point of integration between existing retail management systems and 20 leading online merchandising channels including transactional marketplaces such as Amazon.com, shopping portals such as AOL inStore and Shopping.com, and affiliate marketing programs such as Commission Junction – making it easy for merchants to automate, measure, and optimize online product merchandising campaigns through these channels. Mercent customers include GUESS? (NYSE:GES), Lucky Brand Jeans (NYSE:LIZ), Gaiam (NASDAQ: GAIA), Wet Seal (NASDAQ:WTSLA), Finlay Enterprises (NASDAQ:FNLY), Proflowers (NASDAQ: PRVD), Crabtree & Evelyn, Car Toys, Fortunoff, and other leading retailers. Mercent is a venture funded company based in Seattle, WA.

Source: Wired News