Social shopping site Wishpot has taken $1 million Series A in a round led by Monster Venture Partner that included H-Farm and Adrian Hanauer. Wishpot is a social shopping service that lets you collect and and share information about items you find online and in stores. By creating a common space in which users can browse, recommend products, get advice, and find new items they’re interested in, Wishpot seeks to simplify shopping. The company said it would use the funding to further enhance its vertical offerings, improve the Wishpot platform, increase business development activities and introduce business analytics for enterprise customers. Wishpot competes in the same space as Kaboodle, Stylehive, Yahoo Shoposphere, Zlio and MyPickList. CrunchBase Information Wishpot Zlio Kaboodle Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Social ecommerce site Zlio has secured $4 million in Series A funding in a round led by Mangrove Capital Partners. The announcement coincides with an important milestone for the Paris based company; Zlio has now reached 100.000 shops with 2.5 millions unique visitors per month. Zlio gives users the ability to create their own shops and sell goods from other ecommerce services. Users can stock their store with over three million products and earn commissions on every item bought from their Zlio Shop in a similar fashion to a regular affiliate program. Zlio made headlines in May when Amazon banned Zlio users from promoting Amazon products on Zlio shops. The company was launched in September 2006 by Jeremie Berrebi, ex founder of Net2one (sold in April 2004), David Levy & Jean Guetta. Mangrove Capital Partners is best known for its early investment in Skype. → Read More
Interesting post in the TechCrunch Forums this morning about Zlio, a startup that lets people create their own shops and sell goods from Amazon and other ecommerce services. Jeremie Berrebi, the CEO of Zlio, emailed users to let them know that Amazon will no longer allow them to promote Amazon products on Zlio shops. It also seems that Amazon stopped paying affiliate fees on sales a week ago. This is a highly unusual move since Amazon generally wants all the affiliates it can get. Chances are that one of two things happened – either Amazon is getting into this business directly, or Zlio was involved in some sort of fraud. We’ll see what Amazon has to say about this. Update: We haven’t heard from Amazon, but Zlio looks to be in direct competition with aStore, a new service from Amazon. See Centernetwork’s coverage here from late last year. Zlio actually launched the same day as aStore. That still isn’t a good explanation as to why Amazon has shut them off, however. → Read More
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