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Vitamins.com Relationship Leads to Multi-Million Dollar, Multi-Year eCM(TM) (eCommerce Management) Contract

BOULDER, Colo., May 24 /PRNewswire/ --

XOR Inc. today announced the signing of a multi-million dollar, multi-year agreement to manage eBusiness for HealthCentral.com (Nasdaq: HCEN). HealthCentral.com manages online retail stores including HealthCentralRx.com, with more than 24,000 health and prescription products, and Vitamins.com, the Internet's category leader in retail sales of nutritional supplements.

"The XOR eCM business model works," said XOR President and CEO Greg Jacobsen. "This contract -- along with our other long-term eCM agreements -- demonstrates our ability to sign long-term eBusiness management agreements. The key to this is our proprietary VisionPort(TM), which enables real-time business management," he added.

"We were impressed with XOR's eBusiness development and management skills with Vitamins.com," said Al Greene, president and CEO of HealthCentral.com, "and we're pleased to have them playing an ongoing role as our business moves forward," he added.

Vitamins.com first approached XOR in early 1999 to redesign their existing web site. Because of the company's complete end-to-end technical expertise, XOR was able to not only meet aggressive development schedules, but also design an innovative Linux-Oracle based platform, allowing for outstanding stability and scalability. HealthCentral.com recently announced a definitive agreement to acquire Vitamins.com, and the relationship with XOR has continued to grow, resulting in this contract.

As an eCM client, HealthCentral.com will also benefit from XOR's proprietary business management system, VisionPort, which provides clients with a customized, real-time view of critical eBusiness data. This is possible due to XOR's complete end-to-end eBusiness management expertise and is not available from any other Internet professional services company or ASP.

"The first day of Vitamins.com's re-launch, orders exceeded our estimates by a factor of 10," said Jason Edwards, CTO of Vitamins.com. "Without a partner like XOR that can bring end-to-end technical expertise and unparalleled eBusiness planning, we would have been faced with a myriad of problems that XOR helped us avoid," he added.

Since the launch, XOR has continued to provide a number of services ranging from site design upgrades and refreshes to complete technical integration of the site with Vitamins.com's ERP systems.

"We believe we have developed the next generation of business-to-consumer Internet site development with Vitamins.com and HealthCentral.com," said Jacobsen. "Because of our end-to-end offering, we're uniquely positioned to work with companies that want to develop a long-term brand using the Internet as a tool, whether that company is a brick and mortar or dot.com," he added.

XOR's eBusiness services not only helped propel Vitamins.com to the nation's leading online nutritional supplement retailer, but according to PCData Online and Goldman Sachs Research, the site had the highest customer conversion rate of any online retailer for the month of January 2000.