GeoCities Expands Its E-Commerce Offering

GeoCities (Nasdaq: GCTY) today announced an agreement with InterWorld Corp. to license and integrate InterWorld’s e-commerce technology into the next generation of GeoShops, GeoCities’ online merchant sites, as well as its branded online commerce site, GeoStore.

This latest development indicates that GeoCities is increasingly interested in e-commerce as a new revenue-generating segment of its operations. It will position GeoCities to compete against Yahoo!Stores for entry-level and small-business e-commerce. Already, GeoCities has a marketing advantage over Yahoo!Stores, because GeoCities can derive both traffic and new online merchants from its existing base of 3.3 million members and 18 million unique visitors per month.

The technical capabilities offered to GeoCities merchants include scalable infrastructure, and e-commerce tools for accounting, inventory management and detailed reporting.

“Online retailing is experiencing exponential growth,” said Thomas R. Evans, President and CEO of GeoCities. “This new technology will allow us to leverage the tremendous amount of traffic that we have at GeoCities for conducting commerce on our site. We are making this growth market easily accessible and affordable to the average merchant to set up and sell products, goods and services over the Internet. Any merchant with a store on Main Street, in a shopping mall or mail order business can now easily and inexpensively have access to a whole new customer base through GeoCities,” added Mr. Evans.

Beyond the News

GeoCities is based in Marina del Rey, California, with offices in London, New York and San Francisco. In October 1998, the GeoCities site generated more than 1.6 billion page views, according to Nielsen I/PRO. GeoCities was the fourth most trafficked Web site on the Internet in November 1998, according to Media Metrix.

InterWorld Corporation is a provider of Internet commerce software and services. Founded in 1995, InterWorld is a privately-held company headquartered in New York, NY, with offices in major U.S. cities as well as Australia, Europe, and Japan.

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