MyOnlyCatalog.com to provide e-commerce capabilities for portals

[June 13th 2001]

MyOnlyCatalog.com said today it is preparing to launch a Web partnering program that takes affiliate marketing to the next level by allowing a wide diversity of special-interest affiliates to sell products directly to their visitors rather than clicking through referrals to merchant sites.

The program, called Merchant Partner Plus, leverages MyOnlyCatalog.com's consolidated inventory from hundreds of catalog merchants to equip potentially thousands of Web portal and information-only sites with store front, e-commerce and order fulfillment capabilities at no financial risk.

"Affiliate programs are well established in the dot-com industry and, unfortunately, so are their deficiencies," said Philip Berlin, CEO at MyOnlyCatalog.com. "The major flaw is that affiliates often give up customers and future revenues to their merchant referrals in exchange for a one-time commission."

MyOnlyCatalog.com proposes to protect its merchant partners' investment in building site traffic by opening its catalog inventory to affiliates who may select products appropriate to their site identity, display downloaded photographs with pricing and take orders, which are fulfilled through the facilities of MyOnlyCatalog.com and its catalog vendor partners.

"We are, in effect, franchising out the MyOnlyCatalog.com business model to a new set of partners that do not have e-commerce capabilities," Berlin said.

The technology that enables the robust linkages is being jointly developed by MyOnlyCatalog.com, Microsoft and KORE, which served as system integrator in building MyOnlyCatalog.com's destination site for catalog shoppers. A Merchant Partner will download software from MyOnlyCatalog.com to build a shopping mall on its site and enable access to MyOnlyCatalog.com's product database for populating its site with related products.

Customers may order products directly from the affiliate, which batches orders and transmits them to MyOnlyCatalog.com for distribution to its catalog partners. Financial transactions and order fulfillment is executed by the catalog partner, which pays MyOnlyCatalog.com a commission that is shared with the Merchant Partner. MyOnlyCatalog.com's role as the central e-commerce hub is transparent to the customer.

The business model is consistent with, and complementary to, current Internet usage, Berlin explained. Every day, more than 100 million users log-on to search engines and portals for key word searches. An example of such a search would be the term "golf."

In some instances, users may choose a link that takes them to a site that provides golf information, but derives revenue from advertising and/or hot links to a site that sells products. In most cases, the customer is most likely to retain the merchant address from that point forward and not return to the portal.

"The Merchant Partner Plus program intervenes in this process by enabling the portal to fulfill customer orders and retain the customer loyalty," Berlin said. "Our inventory of catalogs feature products in a multitude of categories that apply to a wide variety of content based portals."

MyOnlyCatalog.com provides all the tools to make the process work at no charge to the Merchant Partner, Berlin noted. "Our revenue potential is significantly enhanced by growth in commissions on catalog inventory sales."

Links
MyOnlyCatalog.com		http://www.MyOnlyCatalog.com