eBay and Altura International will work together to bring catalog items to the eBay auction site. Altura, a developer of e-commerce shopping solutions, will provide merchandise from its catalog-merchant partners to eBay through its international house brand, CatalogCity.com. Altura will list the catalogers' products on the eBay site and will bring winning bidders to complete the transactions on CatalogCity.com.

Altura is expected to bring about 50 merchants to eBay during the launch phase of the alliance, including Alsto's, San Francisco Music Box Company, DiscoveryStore.com and Hello Direct. Following the initial launch, Altura plans to provide the new service to all its merchant partners and have them selling on eBay by the end of 2002. According to the Direct Marketing Association, the catalog industry generated around $120 billion in merchandise sales in 2001, and is comprised of around 17,000 individual companies.

In addition, consumers at CatalogCity.com and dozens of other malls in the Altura Network will have tabs to promote the eBay Marketplace where consumers can both bid on and buy all products listed on eBay. Lee Lorenzen, president and CEO of Altura International said, "We have consistently focused on being the e-commerce solution provider of choice for the catalog industry. This relationship shows the flexibility of Altura's solution. We have integrated the Altura technology with the eBay API to provide catalogers with easy access to the world's largest online marketplace. Catalogers will now have a huge market of enthusiastic buyers for their closeouts, overstocks, and distressed merchandise. This means our merchants can turn inventory that might normally yield only a few cents on the dollar from a liquidator into a profit center by using eBay as an additional sales distribution channel."

Retailers and catalog merchants face the challenge of integrating inventory and order information with online and offline sales channels. Altura uses its data integration technology to bring items from various sellers together on its CatalogCity.com site, where shoppers can browse merchandise from many catalogs. Its Altura Merchant Operating System (AMOS) is the a multi-vendor, multi-lingual, multi-currency merchant operating system capable of giving consumers around the globe at different Web sites and on different classes of devices easy access to thousands of the world's products. Now Altura is extending its integration technology to eBay, giving its catalog merchants an easy way to reach eBay's millions of members. http://www.catalogcity.com