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By Diane Anderson

Hoping to bring e-commerce to mom-and-pop Web sites, Flycast (FCST) said it would introduce a new software product that will allow the Internet marketing firm's network of clients to sell products and services directly on their sites.

The new product, called Flycast Valet, will be offered to 1,200 sites that ordinarily might be considered too small to expect significant e-commerce revenue. But with some $6 billion expected to be spent online this holiday season, second-tier sites like LatinoLink and MapsBlast are hoping to use Valet to catch those online shoppers confident enough to move beyond Amazon.com (AMZN) and eToys.

For Flycast, the Valet product is an attempt to take advantage of its large but sometimes low-profile client list, many of whose members feel frustrated as they watch e-commerce grow up without them. Media Metrix reports that Flycast's sites together reach more than 25 million consumers each month. Still, DoubleClick (DCLK) delivers ads to sites, many of which already get revenue from advertising as well as e-commerce.

"Ninety percent of our sites don't have VPs in charge of e-commerce," says Greg Stuart, Flycast's VP of business development. Valet gives them a chance to create one-stop storefronts. "We fully expect a large percentage of our sites will sign up," he says.

Here's how Valet works: A Flycast affiliate can choose to add a shopping module to its site, offering visitors a chance to buy products from a range of merchants, including J. Crew and PC Zone. Merchants get additional distribution from this arrangement, and the host site gets a percentage of all sales transactions. Flycast gets a cut by acting as the middleman between the two. The company says its affiliates will be able to offer several million products and services from more than 3,000 merchants and catalogs.

The sites get more than just a chance to make some e-commerce cash. Flycast also offers bells and whistles, in the form of search capabilities and other tools. But the results aren't entirely clean: Flycast includes only products that are within the Valet offering, and merchants can buy keywords so their banner pops when surfers type in certain search words.

From a company's point of view, that's great marketing, but consumers might catch on to the fact that marketers are trying to influence their purchases in subtle ways.

The announcement follows Flycast's recent acquisition of targeted e-mail management and delivery company InterStep, taking the company from banner brokering to e-mail marketing and now to e-commerce. "It's another cog in Flycast's value-creation machine," says Jae Kim, an analyst at Paul Kagan & Associates.

COMPANIES
Flycast (FCST) San Francisco, CA
Amazon.com (AMZN) Seattle, WA
DoubleClick (DCLK) New York, NY

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