Freemerchant.com

Freemerchant.com was the Internet’s first free e-commerce platform for small businesses (now with many imitators, and no longer free). Freemerchant offers e-store building with shopping cart, free site hosting, and an array of back-office support tools. In a fifteen month period (Sept. 1999 – Nov. 2000), Sprung PR obtained coverage for FM in over 100 news stories, in publications including the New York Times (4 times), the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Gannett, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose-Mercury News, San Francisco Examiner, and more than a dozen other newspapers – as well as in the Industry Standard, Business 2.0, Fortune, Inc., FSB, PC Magazine, Smart Business, Computer Shopper, ZDNet’s Anchor Desk, Internet World, InternetWeek, Home Office Computing, Yahoo! Internet Life, Computer Reseller News, Internet.com, Office.com and many other publications.

A major weapon in FM’s PR arsenal was use of "awards and top picks" notices; Sprung PR was able to leverage sterling reviews in the tech trade press and by analyst firms into major newspaper coverage. Another key tool was a series of member store profiles, which garnered coverage in local and trade publications including Craftrends, the Star Ledger, New Jersey Business, Macomb Daily, and Baltimore Magazine.