Eric Best is CEO of Mercent Corp., a Seattle company that helps big brand retailers sell and market products online on Amazon.com, Google and other websites. He spoke to TechFlash about e-commerce trends, social networking, and digging in the dirt.

What’s the quick description of Mercent? Mercent provides software and services that help the world’s leading online retailers promote and sell their products wherever consumers are considering or making purchases on the web these days.

Can you give me an example? When an REI competitor drops the price on a particular product, we make sure REI reacts the right way. Or if a competitor implements a sales event, we help REI react. If a brand new advertising channel launches, we make sure REI is present and accounted for on that channel.

What’s hot in e-commerce right now? Most notably the rise of two categories: mobile shopping in driving real transactions for our customers, and the rise of social networks in influencing consumer buying and shopping behavior. They both represent huge growth opportunities for e-commerce companies.

A lot of people are talking about “social commerce,” combining aspects of social networking and e-commerce, as the next big thing. While Mercent enables storefronts on Facebook, our customers are primarily thinking about engaging with customers in a nonshopping context. REI, for example, is providing updates on hiking trails and new national parks that are opening. They’re providing a lot of value-added content through their Facebook page. It has almost nothing to do with shopping but everything with establishing credibility and a dialogue with customers.

What’s your take on the recent demise of Bing Cashback, the shopping rebate program tied to Microsoft's new search engine? The program served its purpose, which was to create advertiser awareness and make Bing shopping a consumer destination based on very aggressive rebates. It’s not totally surprising to me that they shut it down. It is a high-cost program and Microsoft was effectively subsidizing their advertisers by offering these rebates. But at some point you attract a sufficient advertiser base and shopper base so that providing those aggressive rebates ceases to be necessary. I think we’ll see some exciting new things (from Bing) later this year.

You previously worked at Amazon and now help customers work with Amazon. How do you view the company? They are in a unique position by virtue of their scale and efficiency both as a software company and as a fulfillment and logistics operator. What we are seeing is that there is this virtuous cycle where Amazon’s traffic attracts more competitive merchants, and the more merchants selling against one another the better the prices, and the better the prices the more consumers are going to turn to Amazon as their first destination for online shopping. Even the largest merchants we work with can’t ignore the volume that Amazon represents to their e-commerce business. In some cases we see major e-commerce companies return to (Amazon’s third-party seller) program after opting out for a period of time.

Is Google a big player in e-commerce? We view them as the dark horse, with Stephanie Tilenius, the former eBay executive, joining them as the VP for Commerce. It’s clear to us that Google is making a significant investment in the e-commerce space and the big strategic question that they will have to answer in the next few years is how they go from a strictly catalog and ad-focused business to actually being a participant in the transaction, either through a shopping cart program or a payment program.

What do you do in your spare time? Last week it was camp with my sons. I’m a musician. And I think I must be getting older because I have this newfound affinity for gardening.

Really? Right now it’s kind of landscaping work. It’s still early days. I’m still trying to figure out what our yard should look like in a year or two.

Any vegetables? No, but that’s in the works. I like the fact that Seattle has this organic urban farming culture. Like with the Ballard Bee Co. They basically put hives in the back yard, and you get to keep some of the honey.

My neighbors just got chickens. Is that in your future? We’ve talked about it. It’s not currently in the cards, but maybe someday. With kids, it’s a whole new twist because it’s even more interesting for them.