CornerHardware has distinguished itself through its customer service and broad range of products, iFLOOR said. CornerHardware was named recipient of the Customer Excellence Award and C3 5 Star Site Award from eRetailNews in March 2000. It was featured under the “Best Place to Save You Time and Money” in the 2000 Internet Guide of SmartMoney Magazine’s June 2000 issue, and was named Best Home Improvement Site 2000 in ZDNet / Yahoo Internet Life.

CornerHardware and iFLOOR and have been partners since August, 2000, when iFLOOR began offering CornerHardware a floor covering solution to power its flooring superstore.

“We are excited about this merger because it allows iFLOOR.com to deploy our powerful ‘SMOOTH’ software e-commerce platform into new and larger categories” said Steve Simonson CEO of iFLOOR.com. “We have already proven our software and business model in the very complex floor covering category, and we strongly believe we can add efficiencies, reduce marketing costs and increase sales conversion rates by applying SMOOTH to the home improvement category.” The SMOOTH platform developed by iFLOOR is a sophisticated e-commerce solution that integrates a complex, dynamically generated transactional web site with a user-friendly fulfillment and management tool suite, according to iFloor COO Michael Pinkowski.

“The power of our software, business model and people, combined with the exceptional content CornerHardware has developed, should allow us to dominate the online home improvement category,” Pinkowski added.