EasyAsk provides several unique capabilities, including full spectrum search of natural language phrases and intelligent category search that provides the retail industry with the most complete product search, navigation and merchandising capability resulting in the industry's highest conversion rates. A complete list of EasyAsk capabilities can be found at www.progress.com/easyask/capabilities.

The website conversion rates represent the percentage of people who buy a Rockler product compared with the total number of people who visit that site. Conversion rates are a critical success factor for online retailers since any change upwards or downwards in these rates has an immediate and dramatic impact on revenue. According to Nielsen//NetRatings(1), retailers using the EasyAsk product achieve the highest average online conversion rates among all users of commercially available e-commerce search and navigation technologies. In 2006, EasyAsk customers had on average at least a 33 percent better conversion rate than their competitors. In some cases, the improvement in conversion rate ranged up to a dramatic 92 percent(2).

"The goal of our eCommerce website is to direct visitors to the right products as quickly as possible and Progress EasyAsk ensures that happens," said Dave Werden, Senior Web Developer, Rockler. "Since the deployment of EasyAsk, one of the more impressive results is that we are now achieving a significant increase in total sales per transaction at final checkout. EasyAsk allows our visitors to find more products, including products they weren't even thinking of when they logged on."

A few of the specific ways in which EasyAsk capabilities are being used on Rockler.com include:

-- Easy highlighting of sale items, or overstock items, on "Rockler Outlet" pages (see: www.rockler.com/rockler_outlet.cfm)

-- Promotion and categorization of "Rockler Exclusive" products is simply placed on one landing page (see: www.rockler.com/search_results.cfm?filter=Rockler+Exclusives)

-- Better access to information for website visitors that make the Rockler site even more user friendly to woodworking enthusiasts by using EasyAsk indexing capabilities to show related articles and blog entries along with product search results. For example, when users search for "dust," they will find dozens of dust-control products, as well as industry articles and blog entries that offer valuable insight on the topic (see: http://www.rockler.com/search_results.cfm?filter=dust

"Once we deployed EasyAsk, adding the blogs and articles to the index was a very easy process, and their indexing is automatically updated on the same daily schedule as our product index," continued Werden. "By leveraging the power of EasyAsk functionality, we can better position Rockler as an expert in the field of woodworking and hardware over and above being simply a seller of products."

"Rockler is a great example of how a retailer can leverage the Progress EasyAsk platform to deploy an eCommerce environment quickly and easily," said Larry Harris, vice president and general manager of EasyAsk. "For example, EasyAsk went from a staging environment, to supporting a few select campaigns, to being the foundation of Rockler's search and navigation platform in less than three months. Most importantly, it is already delivering a significant return on investment with improved conversion rates and increased sales."

About Progress Software Corporation

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) provides application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Our goal is to maximize the benefits of information technology while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership. Progress can be reached at www.progress.com or +1-781-280-4000.

Progress and EasyAsk are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

(1) Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Online Retail, November and December 2006. Average conversion rates do not take into consideration duplication among visitors and duplication among customers.

(2) Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Online Retail, based on the 12 month-average of each search vendor's average customer conversion rate for January through December 2006.

SOURCE: Progress Software Corporation