Fancy, the one-time Pinterest competitor which has long since set its sights on social e-commerce, is expanding its reach today with the launch of its internationalization efforts. The company is now making its service available in 30 languages and is shipping its products worldwide. → Read More
Facebook and Twitter have become stellar venues for brands and small businesses alike to advertise their wares. However, while social-style gift-giving has seen some traction thanks to Facebook, social commerce has been slow to take flight. Chirpify launched in early 2012 to do something about this, offering an easy way for people to make purchases in-stream on Twitter. Late last year, the young… → Read More
Israeli startup Getonic, which builds tools for small businesses wanting to sell via social channels such as Facebook, has announced it has raised $1.3 million in total funding. Getonic’s seed backers include thetime, Rutledge Vine Capital, private investor Mortimer Singer, and other unnamed angel investors. → Read More
Amex has extended its Twitter sync feature to enable customers who have synced their Amex account information with Twitter to also pay for certain products by tweeting purchase hashtags. Amex launched its original Twitter Sync feature last March — to allow customers get discount deals by tweeting offer hashtags. Now the card company has gone a step further by integrating payment into Twitter. → Read More
In the fall of 2011, we caught up with social commerce startup, Yardsellr, which the founders claimed at the time had grown into a community of over 5 million people. The Facebook-based social commerce platform was listing 6K new items for sale each day (at the time) and had over 120K items for sale in total. This, by the way, came after the company raised $5 million from Accel in 2010. → Read More
Yesterday Intuit took a step into social commerce with the acquisition of the team, technology and patents of social payments startup Payvment. Today, it’s revealing more about how it plans to expand its services into new areas to complement its bread-and-butter business of payrolls and accounting software, with over 20 new products. They include those in payments technologies using NFC and… → Read More
Kitsy Lane, an Etsy-style social commerce platform startup that lets its users open their own internet boutiques selling jewellery or accessories, has announced it’s closed a $3.5 million Series A funding round, led jointly by Data Point Capital and Longworth Venture Partners. Existing investor Point Judith Capital also contributed to the round. → Read More
Wantster, a site founded earlier this year in Canada that lets users collect images of things they want from around the web and pin them on a central page — a kind of Canadian Fancy – has announced a round of funding: $4 million from Evanov Communications, a Canadian radio broadcasting company. → Read More
Facebook has its Gifts, and Chirpify today extended its Twitter in-stream purchasing to include Instagram: social commerce is definitely on the rise when it comes to new services. But a report out today from Eventbrite shows that social commerce is also growing in another sense: people are sharing their activities more than ever, and it’s having a direct impact on the bottom line. → Read More
Chirpify, the social commerce platform that launched six months ago as the only in-stream way to make purchases on Twitter, is now starting to spread its wings: today the company is announcing that it has integrated with Instagram, the photo sharing service owned by Facebook. The move means that people who have signed up to Chirpify’s service, and entered their PayPal and shipping details, can go… → Read More
To date, Facebook has focused the majority of its revenue efforts on ads, and, to a lesser extent, payment services around apps that run on its social platform. But Facebook commerce, where users buy physical or other good not connected to apps, is one area where Facebook has not done much– yet. In the meantime the social network becoming a revenue driver for third parties, including Berlin-based… → Read More
Last week, developer Tom Waddington uncovered Facebook code that points to the creation of a “Want” button — a plugin that potentially points to a new kind of commercial innovation being developed by Facebook itself, different from “want” buttons already being developed by third parties (one example here), and partially working but only within Facebook’s Graph API tester.
He’s continued to dig… → Read More
Thanks to increasingly powerful mobile and web technologies, people can work from practically anywhere. One eCommerce startup, the Utah-based Needle, sees a big opportunity for this mobile, remote, and telecommuting workforce to change the way businesses connect with their customers and influence the way consumers make purchasing decisions. Rather than relying on customer service reps stuffed into… → Read More
Like Milo before it, Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store, which allows any business to quickly create and… → Read More
Brands and businesses can track their reputations online and connect with consumers through social media. But what about in the real world? One of the biggest prizes in Startupland will go to whoever can figure out how to connect real-world shopping to brands and businesses. Steve Carpenter is going after that prize with his latest startup, Endorse.
Carpenter has been incubating the company for… → Read More
For all the excitement around commerce these days, there have been only a few really big changes in the last 100 years. Sears pioneered the mail-order catalog, chains like Walmart consolidated big box retail, and Amazon brought inventory online. After more than 10 years of growth, e-commerce only accounts for about 8% of total commerce in the US. Clearly, we have a long way to go in moving more… → Read More
When Oodle started out six years ago as a classifieds search engine, it’s focus was all around search and bringing together the best classified ads from all over the web. Today, it still does that, but increasingly it is moving more and more towards social classifieds. “We are 100 percent committed to social,” CEO Craig Donato tells me.
Oodle already powers the Facebook Marketplace, perhaps the… → Read More
As Groupon weighs a $5 billion+ acquisition offer from Google and LivingSocial is believed to be about get a $100 Million to $150 million cash infusion from Amazon, it is instructive to look at the difference between the two companies. Hitwise looked at a 81 group-buying sites and came up with the chart above, which shows that Groupon commands 79 percent of U.S. visits to the group buying… → Read More
Here come the Groupon partnerships. In what may be the first of several big distribution deals aimed at cementing its lead in social commerce, Groupon and Ning are launching an affiliate beta program today. Anyone who runs a Ning social network can now add a Groupon widget with geo-targeted daily deals. They will get a cut of any Groupon deals purchased through their Ning sites, and Groupon… → Read More
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