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WebPartner Debuts Free E-commerce Site Monitoring Service

Service for small and mid-sized E-commerce businesses enables web marketers to measure the competitiveness of their online store

WebPartner, a developer of web-based services for small and mid-sized companies with online sales channels, today announced its premier offering for E-commerce businesses. A free service, WebPartner monitors online store performance and provides web marketers prompt email and/or pager notification of problems such as “site not found” and “slow response time”, as well as valuable benchmark comparisons against other leading industry and competitive sites.

WebPartner is directed in particular towards small and mid-sized E-commerce businesses, which are critically dependent upon the competitiveness of their online stores but often lack internal resources to perform ongoing E-commerce site monitoring and competitive comparisons. As a web-based service, there is no software to install or maintain. Web managers can register for WebPartner in less than 30 seconds by visiting http://www.webpartner.com.
 
A smoothly functioning online store is critical for E-commerce businesses. A site that is unavailable or slow to respond can, over a period of time, erode a customer base,” observed Scott Alberts, Vice President of Marketing for WebPartner. “By providing a free monitoring service, we are enabling web marketers to ensure that their web revenue channel is running like a well-oiled machine,” further stated Alberts.

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the small and mid-sized E-commerce market is expected to grow from fewer than 200,000 sites at the end of 1998 to more than two million by 2002. These businesses must ensure that their online stores are functional and competitive at all times; failure to do so translates into poor customer satisfaction and potential loss of revenue. WebPartner offers such companies a valuable and business-critical tool to monitor site functionality and in doing so, ensures customers receive a level of service they have come to expect from industry leading E-commerce sites such as Amazon.com and Dell.com. In addition to monitoring an online store, WebPartner allows specific competitor sites to be monitored and compared and provides benchmark comparisons versus a group of 100 top web sites as defined by PC Magazine. Competitive leadership is especially important in E-commerce when customers are just a mouseclick away from the competition.

“An E-commerce site by definition never closes for business. WebPartner gives me the satisfaction of knowing my site is monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Its problem notification features give me the opportunity to promptly correct a problem before my customers decide to visit my competitor’s site,” stated Steven Hoffman, Director of Development for Spiderdance; developer of the most advanced mass-participation server software on the market today.

The free version of WebPartner allows managers to monitor three specific E-commerce critical web pages. Alternatively, a manager may choose to include a competitor’s online store as one of the three pages checked. Weekly performance and competitive analysis reports are emailed to registered users. In addition, users may access historical reports and interactive graphical summaries at the WebPartner site.

Future fee-based versions of the service will allow more comprehensive monitoring of online stores as well as notification of changing competitive conditions. Also available on the WebPartner web site are E-commerce business and technology news headlines and content to help managers plan, implement, and measure their online E-commerce strategies.

To register for the service, managers may visit http://www2.webpartner.com/webpartner_registration2.vsp

To instantly check an online store now, use WebPartner’s InstaCheck tool at http://www2.webpartner.com/instacheck.asp

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