CAMBRIDGE, Mass., and CHICAGO September 13, 2005 -- Endeca and ShopLocal announced today that the companies are working on significant advancements to the popular local shopping site, ShopLocal.com, to be launched in time for this year's peak holiday shopping season. The new ShopLocal.com will differ dramatically from similar comparison and local shopping engines in two major ways. In addition to its current web-to-store approach, the new ShopLocal.com site will compile products and prices from local brick and mortar retail stores, as well as retailers' online stores -- offering a comprehensive view of what is on sale as well as for sale. The new site will also feature the Endeca InFront® commerce search, Guided Navigation® and merchandising engine, giving shoppers new, powerful ways to find and compare products by desirable criteria like retailer, brand, store location, price and more.
A joint venture of Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), Tribune Company (NYSE: TRB), and Knight Ridder, Inc. (NYSE: KRI), ShopLocal offers local and national retailers the ability to expose their product offerings, sale items and overall selection to a wide audience of online shoppers via a single source. Shoppers simply select their location and ShopLocal couples the experience of showing products available in their local retail stores with select e-commerce offerings.
Endeca is the leading provider of Guided Navigation, search and analysis solutions, offering next-generation information access technology and services for Web sites, e-commerce storefronts, intranets, portals and enterprise applications.
This is the latest in a series of advances by ShopLocal, the 10th largest shopping comparison site (Source: comScore Media Metrix), to offer the best customer experience on the web. The new Endeca-powered search, navigation and merchandising features will provide shoppers with a wide variety of ways to look for, compare and purchase products. The search engine itself will support cutting-edge features like:
Tapping these capabilities, shoppers using the new ShopLocal site will be able to research products from multiple, local retailers and web-based retailers in ways not possible on similar sites, and then purchase the most desirable products either online or offline.
"Sometimes shoppers are seeking a very specific item. Sometimes they are simply browsing opportunistically for deals. Or perhaps they are looking for a gift and start the process knowing the age, gender, size, tastes of the recipient, a price range and a list of desirable retailers," said Brian Hand, CEO of ShopLocal. "We want to accommodate for all of these real shopping behaviors -- offering the tools to both intuitively explore a wide selection and quickly find highly specific products. By teaming with Endeca and our retail partners, we can provide a compelling shopping experience that goes well beyond that of any other local shopping resource."
The Endeca InFront solution has become the e-commerce search engine of choice by the world's best-known and most successful retailers. Powering the largest and most heavily trafficked online stores on the Web, Endeca InFront is used by more of the top 100 online retailers than all competing commercial solutions combined. Customers include North American retail giants like 1-800-Flowers.com, Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, CompUSA, Eddie Bauer, The Home Depot, Kmart, PETCO, TJX, Walgreens and Walmart.com; leading UK merchants like Comet, Littlewoods, and Tesco; and major Dutch retailers Wehkamp and Bol.com.
"ShopLocal has a distinct advantage over any other local shopping engine due to its close relationship with its local retail partners and the related exposure to their in-store offerings," said Jim Baum, president and CEO of Endeca. "By adding a proven next-generation shopping engine like the Endeca InFront solution along with the ability to purchase on or offline, you have valuable, first-of-its-kind service that no competitive solution can match."
About Endeca
Endeca's award-winning Guided Navigation, Enterprise Search, and
Analysis solutions help organizations integrate, discover, and
navigate enterprise data to solve business problems associated with
information overload. Endeca's customers include a wide range of
enterprises, including retailers (Barnes & Noble, The Home
Depot, Wal-Mart); financial services (Bank of America, MFS
Investment Management, Putnam Investments); manufacturing and
distribution (IBM, Arrow Electronics, and John Deere); media and
publishing (World Book and IHS) and government (the Library of
Congress, NASA, and the National Cancer Institute). Endeca is a
private company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. More information:
www.endeca.com or info@endeca.com.
About ShopLocal
ShopLocal is the leading provider of Web shopping services for
retailers and other local businesses, helping them connect with
millions of consumers who use the Internet each year to purchase
products online as well as those who use it as a research tool for
offline purchases. Retailers depend on ShopLocal's
SmartCircular and Smart Catalog services to
distribute sales and promotional content through their own Web
sites, offering a convenient and localized experience for their
customers. The ShopLocal Network, consisting of
ShopLocal.com and more than 200 leading media, search and shopping
Web sites, provides retailers with access to a dynamic,
geographically-based marketplace of ready-to-buy shoppers looking
to purchase items from t-shirts to televisions, and food to
furniture online or at a store near them. Retailers benefit from
ShopLocal's DataPoint services, the most complete
Web-to-store tracking information available, providing retailers
with the understanding necessary to make each Web-shopping effort
more successful. Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI), Tribune Company
(NYSE:TRB), and Knight Ridder, Inc. (NYSE:KRI), are partners in
ShopLocal and other joint ventures to provide consumers online
products such as CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com and
Apartments.com.
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