ChoiceStream and Sterling Commerce Partner to Optimize the Online Shopping Experience for Consumers.

Partnership Enables Companies to Drive Faster Sales Conversions, Increase Order Sizes and Increase Customer Purchases through a More Personalized Merchandising Experience for Consumers

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- ChoiceStream, Inc., a leading personalization service provider, today announced that it is partnering with Sterling Commerce, an AT&T Inc. company, to offer ChoiceStream's hosted personalization service with Sterling Multi-Channel Selling[TM]. The joint sales and marketing efforts of ChoiceStream and Sterling Commerce will enable business-to-consumer (B2C) companies to create a more relevant, customer-centric buying experience by combining the power of automated personalized merchandising with a comprehensive multi-channel selling platform.

With clients like Blockbuster, Overstock.com and Borders, ChoiceStream's patent-pending service delivers personalized merchandising based on each consumer's preferences and shopping intentions to increase sales conversion, boost average order size, and drive incremental sales. Sterling Multi-Channel Selling is a comprehensive platform that drives business-to-consumer (B2C) business, helping companies increase revenue by enabling sales through multiple channels and various business models and reducing costs by automating the entire sales process.

Today's consumers are overwhelmed with seemingly unlimited choice. Personalized product recommendations provide a way to simplify - and therefore enhance - the online shopping experience while also helping retailers increase share of wallet. As Sucharita Mulpuru, senior retail analyst at Forrester, writes in her December 2007 report, Which Personalization Tools Work For eCommerce -- And Why: "As the amount of content online grows -- particularly on eCommerce sites that often sell tens of thousands of different products -- and consumers are left to wade through cumbersome experiences on their own, personalized eCommerce experiences promise customer engagement and loyalty through increased relevance."

"Personalized product recommendations have become a 'must-have' for retailers and other B2C companies, and we are delighted to partner with Sterling Commerce to offer online merchants the ability to cater to consumers with the most relevant shopping experience possible," said Toffer Winslow, EVP of ChoiceStream Sales and Marketing. "By combining our two proven retail solutions that help consumers quickly and easily find the products they want, we're delivering capabilities that are critical to retailers' success--particularly in today's tough economic climate."

"ChoiceStream's fully-automated personalization complements our own rules-based capabilities and we are excited to be able to offer it to our customers," said Cory Wiegert, vice president of global product line applications at Sterling Commerce. "We are giving the B2C merchandiser the best of both worlds: control over recommendations through rules-based personalization, and automated recommendations for situations where rules are too cumbersome or difficult to manage."

Sterling Multi-Channel Selling synchronizes selling and order management across all of a company's channels (online, call center, and store) to drive measurable improvements in sales. It complements and extends customers' existing ERP and CRM investments by automating marketing, guided selling, quotes and proposals, and order management processes. Sterling Multi-Channel Selling provides rules-based marketing analytics and segmentation capabilities that make customer behaviors and purchase history actionable for marketing purposes.

The ChoiceStream Web-hosted targeted recommendation service is the only retail solution proven to create a truly personalized shopping experience that maximizes profits, reduces merchandising time and costs, and builds customer loyalty. It allows retailers to deliver this experience by powering automated, personalized product recommendations, including cross-sells, up-sells and next-sells, across all sales channels. ChoiceStream analyzes users' shopping behavior and merchants' catalogs, as well as the context in which recommendations will be displayed, to target each consumer with the products most likely to generate purchases.

About ChoiceStream, Inc.

ChoiceStream is the premier personalization service provider for the world's largest e-retail, entertainment, TV and mobile brands, including Comcast, Borders, AT&T, DirecTV, AOL, Blockbuster, Yahoo!, and Overstock.com. Recently named the company with the "deepest experience" and the "largest and longest-standing of the 'pure-play' personalization engines" by Forrester Research, ChoiceStream enables customers to put the right products in front of the right shoppers at the right time to maximize the value of every interaction with their consumers.

ChoiceStream can recommend all types of merchandise--from apparel to electronics and everything in between--and can be delivered via any medium, including the desktop, mobile devices, the TV set-top, and call centers. That means customers can invest in one personalization service for all their business needs.

And, best of all, ChoiceStream delivers this innovation through a fully-hosted service. There is no costly investment in IT infrastructure and no hardware to maintain. Just the tools customers need to dramatically increase revenue and satisfaction with their service.