LAS VEGAS, NV -- (Marketwire) -- 09/22/09 -- At the 2009 Shop.org Conference, MyBuys, the leading provider of personalized product recommendations (PPR) for retailers, today introduced the MyBuys E-Commerce Wellness Index to measure the overall health of U.S. e-commerce and track key trends among online merchants. The initial index reports that for the month of August, despite 13% year-over-year growth in total revenue, the health of e-commerce was up three percent. Sales of discounted items were up over 100% from the previous year and the depth of discounts also increased. Despite the heavy promotion based sales increases, online retailers also saw only marginal gains in revenue from non-promoted items. Consumers bought fewer additional impulse items which affected resulting average order value (AOV).

"We created the MyBuys E-Commerce Wellness Index(TM) to highlight and share key trends among our clients and across the online retail industry. The index shows that in this challenging economy consumers are looking for deals. However, a key statistic to note is that non-promoted sales are starting to turn up and the overall health of the sector is up three percent," said Robert Cell, CEO MyBuys. "With much easier comparisons in the remaining months of the year from a difficult Q4 in 2008, we expect Q4 2009 revenues and other key metrics to be much stronger this year. We have seen savvy retailers increase non-promoted sales through the use of personalized recommendations to highlight higher margin items after attracting consumers to their sites with promotions. E-tailers that are executing well in merchandising are protecting their bottom lines by suggesting full price items of relevance to their consumers."

Personalized product recommendations continue to drive sales and profits for MyBuys clients -- and analysis shows that when recommendations are placed above the fold, they are four times more likely to convert. In addition, having the star rating score as part of a recommendation motivates 26% of shoppers to buy more. When applying personalization to email, online retailers are experiencing four times revenue per email when compared to batch and blast emails. Relevance is fundamental to turning e-commerce health around.

About MyBuys Ecommerce Wellness Index(TM)

The MyBuys Composite Index aggregates total sales, non-promoted sales, discounted sales performance, depth of discounts, AOV and consumer impulse response from over 100 MyBuys clients.

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