New Internet Discovery Service from Aggregate Knowledge Drives over 20% of Holiday Purchases on Overstock.com


SAN MATEO, Calif. and DEMO 07, Jan. 30: Over 20% of all products purchased this holiday season at online retailer Overstock.com were discovered by consumers using the new "discovery window" powered by Aggregate Knowledge. Aggregate Knowledge's Discovery for Retail(TM) Web service drives product discovery and navigation for Overstock by leveraging the collective behavior of its customers to anticipate and surface relevant suggestions. The service lets retailers move beyond traditional search, allowing their customers to discover new, relevant items they hadn't yet considered.

"Keyword search is great if you know what you're looking for," said Paul Martino, Aggregate Knowledge's founder and CEO. "But how do you find those things you know are out there when you don't know the two or three magic words to type into Google? Our Discovery Services emulate the way consumers find products they want when they are offline -- by observing the behavior of other people.

"For example, you notice a small boutique and something in the window catches your eye, so you enter and purchase it. Or, you notice a waiter delivering a dessert to the next table and think 'I'll have what she's having.' With the introduction of Discovery for Retail, these serendipitous discoveries can now happen online as well."

Aggregate Knowledge's Discovery Window(TM) provides Overstock with a 'window' into its 800,000-plus SKU database, delivering customers suggestions that instantly adapt to their choices. Prior to Aggregate Knowledge, managers relied on various expensive and arcane enterprise software packages. Today, Aggregate Knowledge offers site managers a significant leap forward by providing retailers a cost-effective, actionable merchandising solution, delivering the performance of enterprise software packages without the associated investment in resources and time.

"Aggregate Knowledge has exceeded our demanding expectations," said Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com's CEO. "Our customers love the new choices they are given and we are thrilled with the results -- higher sales conversions, larger shopping cart sizes and increased customer engagement and satisfaction."

Aggregate Knowledge achieves a breakthrough in discovery and navigation by observing the anonymous behavior of prior customers to anticipate each new user's intent and to surface relevant options. Since Aggregate Knowledge requires neither personal information nor site registrations, both personal identity and proprietary information remain secure.

According to Byrne, the deployment of Aggregate Knowledge's Discovery Service was quick and painless. "There were skeptics in our organization when Aggregate Knowledge said they could deploy their service in about two weeks," he said. "But they delivered in 16 days, and we started generating additional revenue instantly. We are thrilled with our relationship with Aggregate Knowledge and will be rolling out additional Aggregate Knowledge services throughout the year."

Based on a super computer architecture that can aggregate billions of data points in real time, Aggregate Knowledge's Discovery Services are ideal for retail sites with hundreds of thousands of SKUs. Without Aggregate Knowledge's technology, shoppers would only be able to find a fraction of the items on a site that might interest them.

"Our experience with Overstock and others proves that harnessing the wisdom of crowds delivers breakthroughs in site ease-of-use, customer conversion and shopping cart size," said Martino. "What's equally revolutionary is our pricing model. We deliver the power and performance of traditional enterprise software-as a pay-for-performance service that we give away for free for the first 30 days. This approach ensures that our client's success remains at the center of our business model."

About Aggregate Knowledge

Aggregate Knowledge offers the industry's first online Collective Discovery Services that emulate the way people naturally discover and shop for products and information offline. Built on top of a sophisticated, super computing architecture, Aggregate Knowledge harnesses the behavior of users to fundamentally change the way people navigate and engage online. Aggregate Knowledge delivers significant revenue enhancement to site owners by providing real-time, collective merchandising and navigation capabilities. Funded by premier venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the company's management team includes veterans from IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Sun and Tribe.net. More information can be found at aggregateknowlege.com.

About Overstock.com

Overstock.com, Inc. is an online "closeout" retailer offering discount, brand-name merchandise for sale over the Internet. The company offers its customers an opportunity to shop for bargains conveniently, while offering its suppliers an alternative inventory liquidation distribution channel. Overstock.com, headquartered in Salt Lake City, is a publicly traded company listed on the NASDAQ Global Market and can be found online at http://www.overstock.com/.

FCMN Contact: nicole@krause-taylor.com

Source: Aggregate Knowledge

CONTACT: Barbara Krause of Krause Taylor Associates, direct,
+1-408-918-9081, or main, +1-408-918-9080, or barbara@krause-taylor.com,
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Web site: http://www.aggregateknowledge.com/

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