This is an exciting time for Wize Commerce. We’ve got a number of new offerings in the pipeline, and we’re working every day to improve performance on our existing products and services. Here’s just a sampling of what’s new, and what you can expect to see from us in the weeks and months ahead.

Wize Commerce recently launched its new ApplianceShopping.com site, which is focused primarily on products for the home. The site highlights our new catalog technology, which allows users to quickly and thoroughly compare appliances based on price and relevant specs.

We’re currently live with refrigerators, TVs, washers, and dryers – and we will be further expanding our catalog in the coming weeks. We are confident this site will be a go-to destination for online shoppers looking for top products for the home — and indeed any product where detail on specifications is important to a satisfying purchasing process — at the right price. Give it a try today and make sure you are well represented in these categories by providing not only your full list of products, but other important information like brand, UPC, and manufacturer part numbers. This will allow us to accurately map products to the correct model information and ensure maximum visibility for your products.

We’ve been experimenting with a number of different tweaks and improvements to Nextag, and we are particularly pleased with the results of our enhancements to the site’s “Buy” button. In recent months, we have ramped up traffic on the button and relabeled it “Express Checkout.”  Tests are now showing an up to 8X increase in merchant conversion when shoppers utilize this new feature. But we’re not stopping there – you’ll be seeing a lot more progress and increased benefits with our largest site in the months ahead.

Looking to reach shoppers in Japan? Then check out iinedan.com – “good price” in Japanese – which is our second Japanese site after the 2010 launch of nextag.co.jp. The site, which is modeled after pricemachine.com, was built on a new JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology framework and will allow us to accelerate our deployment of similar websites in other international markets. We believe this will create better performance for our merchants, ultimately in all markets as this technology is implemented in all markets.

What does this mean for you? By leveraging the full breadth of our Japanese product catalog and bolstering our presence in what is already our third largest market, we expect to boost shopping traffic by up to 30 percent.

We’re pleased to announce that AOL Shopping is now powered by Nextag. Earlier this month, we successfully launched this new co-branded partnership with one of the largest shopping sites online. We’ll be buying media on various targeted AOL properties like The Huffington Post, moviefone.com, and engadget.com to drive traffic through the co-brand, and to drive traffic to our own sites.

When shoppers visit the AOL Shopping site, they will be automatically directed to aol.nextag.com. Broadly speaking, this means we can provide more traffic and additional quality clicks to your site. As a merchant, if you want to take advantage of this incremental traffic, make sure you opt-in for our co-brand traffic sources.

This is an exciting step forward in our continued expansion – and will allow us to reach even more shoppers and help expand opportunities for our merchant partners.

In other Wize Commerce news, we’re excited that CPC Strategy has once again ranked us number one and thus the largest independent comparison-shopping service in our sector for highest gross merchandise sales and merchant conversion. We appreciate the third-party validation of our ability to attract potential shoppers and convert them to actual buyers.