Press Release: Stone Edge Partnership with Altura International Offers New Marketing Opportunity to Small Web Merchants
Press Release
Stone Edge Partnership with Altura International
Offers New Marketing Opportunity to Small Web Merchants
3/19/2004 Blue Bell, PA - Stone Edge Technologies, Inc. has
announced an exclusive marketing arrangement with Altura International that will
make it easy for merchants who use the Stone Edge Order Manager to offer their
products through the world’s largest online shopping network. The Stone Edge
Order Manager is a computer program that helps merchants who use popular
shopping cart systems manage and streamline their operations. Altura
International, backed by Bill Gates, Yahoo and Amazon, is the world's leading
provider of custom online malls, including Shop.com and CatalogCity.com. Now
Order Manager users will be able to supplement their regular Web sales by
offering their entire product line to a customer base of more than 4 million
registered users, plus another 150 million shoppers on the Altura Network.
Over 700 merchants use the Stone Edge Order Manager
to help run their businesses. They utilize shopping carts such as Yahoo!Store,
Miva Merchant, ShopSite, osCommerce, AbleCommerce and others, and typically
handle 10 to 2,000 orders per day. While the Order Manager can help them manage
their orders, customers, inventory and fulfillment issues, it still takes a lot
of time and effort to manage their Web stores and find ways to bring in new
customers. With Altura, they can offer their products in more than 30 custom
shopping environments in the largest Web portals, affinity sites, and Fortune
500 companies, such as Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Froogle, Shopping.com, CBS Sportsline,
Commission Junction, Shaklee and MasterCard Exclusives Online. They do not have
to purchase, learn and maintain a new shopping cart or figure out how to attract
customers. The Order Manager will send their product information to Altura,
including links to images, product descriptions, pricing, etc. and then import
the orders once they start coming in. And all it takes is a few button clicks!
“Most of Altura’s partner merchants are major
mail order, online catalog and retail businesses, such as The Bombay Company,
The Sharper Image and Office Max.” said Barney Stone, President of Stone Edge
Technologies. “Now Order Manager users will be able to include their own
products, brands, and company names in exactly the same competitive environment,
with the Order Manager handling all of the technical details, and at a price
most merchants can afford. This will be a great way to supplement their regular
Web businesses, expand their markets and increase sales with minimal effort and
risk.”
Stone also emphasized that this is not a
pay-per-click or search engine placement program. “Shoppers and searchers will
be presented with your product information in a shopping cart environment with a
‘buy’ button. Orders will go through Altura’s system, but once you download them
into the Order Manager they are your orders, and they include full customer
information.”
Altura and Stone Edge expect to begin offering
their combined system in April, 2004. Merchants who want to use the system will
pay a small monthly fee and a percentage of their Altura sales to Altura
International. For more information, merchants should contact Stone Edge
Technologies or go to www.StoneEdge.com.
Altura International is a privately held company and is headquartered in
Monterey, CA. Founded in 1997 and partially funded by Bill Gates, Bear Creek
Corp. and Yahoo!, among others, Altura International is a technology company
whose primary business is facilitating e-commerce on the Web. For more
information, please phone (831) 649-2489.
Stone Edge Technologies is a privately owned
company that specializes in developing affordable e-commerce software products
for small business. Barney Stone, a pioneer developer of relational database
management software for desktop computers, founded the company in 1983.
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Stone Edge Technologies, Inc
6198 Butler Pike, Ste #151
Blue Bell PA, 19422
Telephone: (877) 786-6393
Fax: (215) 641-1837
