Shoply Lets Anyone Create An Online Store

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Friday, June 11th, 2010

UK-based startup Shoply wants to allow anyone to sell anything online. The company offers free SaaS that allows people to sell their goods in an online marketplace, with their own storefront and website.

The idea behind the site is fairly simple. Shoply aims to compete with eBay and other marketplaces by not charging setup or listing fees. Shoply makes money by charging a small transaction fee, which is 6 percent of a total transaction, on all purchases made through its platform as well as through monthly subscription plans for premium packages. Payments are made via PayPal.

Shoply also lets sellers integrate their virtual shops with social networks like Twitter and Facebook, allowing people to Tweet products out and use Facebook Connect to push updates. The ambition is to create a virtual shopping mall of sorts, where users can come to Shoply and try to find an item by doing a keyword search in the marketplace. And Shoply handles the SEO for the shop owners. The idea sounds great in theory, but it may be a challenge for Shoply to attract seller who already have an established base on Amazon, eBay and even Etsy. At the moment, Shoply has under 30 shops on the site. I think for the startup to start standing apart from these established competitors, it may have push a more disruptive model, such as such as that of marketplace on Facebook. Shoply’s founder Liad Shababo says that the site currently offers this functionality, which will compete with fellow Facebook marketplace Payvment.

Company: shoply
Website: shoply.com
Launch Date: 2011

Shoply is a social shopping marketplace for small brands and local businesses. Shoply’s goal is to connect you with the products you love and the people who create them. Shoply is all about empowerment. It democratises ecommerce and makes it dead simple for anyone to open a shop and sell online. Shoply is proud to have people from all over the world selling in it’s marketplace, including fashion designers in New York, graffiti artists in Los Angeles and patisserie chefs...

→ Learn more

Tags:
blog comments powered by Disqus