Bringing social commerce to Facebook is a big opportunity attracting a lot of capital these days. Social swap meet Yardsellr just raised a $5 million series A financing, led by Accel Partners. Harrison Metal Capital, which previously put up $750,000 in seed funding, also participated.
Yardsellr is an eBay for Facebook, except without the auctions. In fact, the company was founded by three former eBay executives, CEO Daniel Leffel (a former manager at eBay), VP of Marketing Jed Clevenger (who used to run the paid search team at eBay), and VP of Community Rachel Makool (who used to run the community team at eBay). Investor Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal is also a former SVP of eBay.com. Yardsellr is currently run out of the Harrison Metal office in Palo Alto.
Sellers list items at fixed prices in different categories, or “blocks.” such as guitars, legos, jewelry, purses. Generally these are items people love and tend to talk about fanatically. Buyers can also follow blocks on Twitter, but most of the action is on Facebook. Yardsellr appeals to women in their thirties, which is not a strong demographic for Twitter.
Buyers can get a steady stream of new items within any category by liking a block. This functions as an opt-in social marketing stream right in people’s feeds. “Facebook has one product essentially, which is that stream,” says Leffel. “You can’t be social commerce without living fundamentally in it.” The service launched in January, but didn’t really get a big push until April. All told, 1.3 million people are following Yardsellr blocks. About 100,000 or actively comment on the items in their feed, and thousands of transactions have occurred, with that number starting to ramp up every month.
Although Leffel wouldn’t go into details, a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts the value of goods bought and sold over Yardsellr is in the tens of thousands of dollars to low hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead of charging sellers to list fees, as eBay does, Yardsellr charges the buyers a fee of around ten percent. Yardsellr competes with Oodle, which is runs the official classifieds app for Facebook.
Yardsellr is an online marketplace which uses social networks to connect buyers and sellers. Yardsellr believes that people are natural born buyers and sellers. In the tradition of neighborhood garage- and yard-sales, we make it easy for you to list and sell, or find and buy whatever you want. Best of all, the buying and selling is done by regular people like you. That means you get great prices from folks you can trust within your network or...
Accel Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices located in Silicon Valley, New York, London, China, and India. They typically make multi-stage investments in internet technology companies. Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of excellence and innovation in the venture capital business and is dedicated to partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class companies. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo...
Harrison Metal invests in early stage, technology driven businesses led by exceptional entrepreneurs. They look for unique combinations of leaders and ideas seeking to: Create extraordinary value in the daily lives of users Compete in large markets in transition Capture a share of value created through a sound economic model Build a team of creative, results driven people
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