ShopStyle

Last updated

ShopStyle is a digital shopping platform owned by Ebates. [1] Launched in 2007 as a Web search engine for fashion, it was thereafter transformed into a fashion marketplace and inspiration engine. [2] ShopStyle lists over 14 million products across apparel, accessories, beauty, home furnishings and kids' items. It drives $1 billion in gross sales to its global network of 1,400 retailers. [3] ShopStyle is also the commerce engine behind ShopStyle Collective, a creator marketing company with over 14,000 bloggers, vloggers and social media users, [4] who use ShopStyle’s platform to earn money from the sales they drive to retailers.

Contents

History

ShopStyle was thought-up by San Francisco-based UK expat Andy Moss [5] in 2006 while he was running local e-commerce website Cairo[ citation needed ] and noticed that shoes were among the most popular items searched for there. [6] [7] The technology behind ShopStyle was created by a group of engineers Moss had met while working at Ariba (now SAP Ariba), including Trey Matteson, [8] Garrick Toubassi [9] and Mike Lenz. [10] The US website launched in February 2007 with a focus on aesthetics and user experience in an attempt to recreate a magazine-like experience digitally. It was variously described as an online equivalent of a shopping mall or a shoppable digital magazine. [7] In September 2007 PopSugar Inc. (then Sugar Publishing) purchased ShopStyle for an undisclosed sum. [11] [12] After the acquisition, ShopStyle focused its efforts on broadening out the product count, retailer expansion and becoming a search engine for fashion [13] By the end of 2015 ShopStyle’s global sites generated five million searches per week and listed 12 million products from 1,400 retailers. [14] In 2017, ShopStyle was bought [15] by Ebates, known now as Rakuten Rewards.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shopping</span> Buying goods

Shopping is an activity in which a customer browses the available goods or services presented by one or more retailers with the potential intent to purchase a suitable selection of them. A typology of shopper types has been developed by scholars which identifies one group of shoppers as recreational shoppers, that is, those who enjoy shopping and view it as a leisure activity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Retail</span> Sale of goods and services from individuals or businesses to the end-user

Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and then sells in smaller quantities to consumers for a profit. Retailers are the final link in the supply chain from producers to consumers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rakuten</span> Japanese e-commerce company

Rakuten Group, Inc. is a Japanese technology conglomerate based in Tokyo, founded by Hiroshi Mikitani in 1997. Centered around Rakuten Ichiba, its businesses include financial services utilizing financial technology, as well as digital content and communications services such as the messaging app Viber, e-book distributor Kobo, and Japan's fourth mobile carrier Rakuten Mobile. Rakuten has more than 28,000 employees worldwide, operating in 29 countries and regions, and its revenues totaled US $7.2 billion with operating profits of about US$347.9 million as of 2016. Rakuten was the official sponsor of the Spanish football club FC Barcelona from 2017 until 2021, and the Golden State Warriors of the NBA, as of 2022. It is often referred to as the "Amazon of Japan".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Online shopping</span> Form of electronic commerce

Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product's availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2020, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">YesAsia</span>

YesAsia is an online retail company founded in 1998 that sells Asian entertainment products worldwide. After initially focusing on CD and video retailing, it has expanded into other entertainment and hobby products such as manga, video games and consoles, electronics and toys.

A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot, aggregator or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare products based on price, features, reviews and other criteria. Most comparison shopping sites aggregate product listings from many different retailers but do not directly sell products themselves, instead earning money from affiliate marketing agreements. In the United Kingdom, these services made between £780m and £950m in revenue in 2005. Hence, E-commerce accounted for an 18.2 percent share of total business turnover in the United Kingdom in 2012. Online sales already account for 13% of the total UK economy, and its expected to increase to 15% by 2017. There is a huge contribution of comparison shopping websites in the expansion of the current E-commerce industry.

Fashion blogs are blogs that cover the fashion industry, clothing, and lifestyle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual merchandising</span> Marketing technique emphasizing 3D model displays

Visual Merchandising is the practice in the retail industry of optimizing the presentation of products and services to better highlight their features and benefits. The purpose of such visual merchandising is to attract, engage, and motivate the customer towards making a purchase.

Style.com was a luxury e-commerce website, launched by international media company Condé Nast in September 2016. In June 2017 Style.com was closed and absorbed by online retailer Farfetch.com

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Taobao</span> Chinese website for online shopping

Taobao is a Chinese online shopping platform. It is headquartered in Hangzhou and is owned by Alibaba. According to Alexa rank, it is the eighth most-visited website globally in 2021. Taobao.com was registered on April 21, 2003 by Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd.

PopSugar Inc. is an American media and technology company that is the parent to the media property PopSugar and a monthly subscription business PopSugar Must Have. The company was founded in 2006 by married couple Brian and Lisa Sugar as a pop culture blog. The company is part of American digital holding company Group Nine Media.

Social commerce is a subset of electronics commerce that involves social media and online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services.

Rakuten.com/shop was an e-commerce marketplace based in San Mateo, California. Previously known as Buy.com, it was founded in 1997 by Scott Blum. In 2010, it was purchased by Japanese company Rakuten, and rebranded as Rakuten.com. This business was shut down by Rakuten in 2020.

Polyvore was a community-powered social commerce website headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company's virtual mood board function allowed community members to add products into a shared product index, and use them to create image collages called "Sets". They could browse other users' sets for inspiration, share sets with friends and interact with people through comments and likes. Due to the visual nature of the tool Polyvore was mostly used to build sets in the fields of home decoration, beauty and fashion. Online retailers, too, could upload their product images to Polyvore and link back to their product pages or use Polyvore to encourage users to showcase their products through such activities as board creation competitions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unilog Content Solutions</span> Indian software company

Unilog Content Solutions is a global technology company specializing in eCommerce and product data management in the B2B marketplace. Their flagship product is CIMM2, a software platform designed to facilitate commerce and communication between businesses. The company is headquartered in Bangalore, India with North American headquarters near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2015 and 2016, Unilog was named one of the "50 Fastest Growing Tech Companies" by The Silicon Review and has been positioned in the Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce by Gartner since 2016.

Gadget Flow is a New York City-based curated e-commerce marketplace launched in 2012 in Greece by Evan Varsamis, Cassie Ousta, and Mike Chliounakis. At 22 million visits per month it is among the largest product-search engines with an emphasis on researching products from Amazon, Etsy, Kickstarter, IndieGogo and other crowdfunding platforms.

SK Planet Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of SK Telecom, was established in 2011 and is an internet platform development company located in Pangyo, South Korea’s silicon valley with operations in 8 countries. SK Planet was spun off from SK Telecom to focus on online services and has since evolved to focus on three core business services: e-Commerce, Online-to-Offline services, and digital marketing.

Pricesearcher is an independent e-commerce search engine launched in the UK in 2016 which helps shoppers find the best prices for products online. It does not use the traditional Price Comparison Website (PCW) model adopted by comparison sites such as Moneysupermarket.com and search engines such as Google Shopping where retailers pay to list their products for sale. Since its inception, it has listed products from online retailers, without charging a listing fee or commission for sales. Product search results are consequently unaffected by a retailer's marketing budget or lack thereof. Shoppers are able to use the vertical search engine as a price-checking tool, to see whether the goods they find 'on sale' elsewhere are genuinely a good deal.

Jenny Griffiths is the founder and CEO of Snap Vision. She is a software engineer turned entrepreneur.

Shein is a Chinese online fast fashion retailer. Shein, originally named ZZKKO, was founded in 2008 by Chris Xu in Nanjing, China. The company is known for its affordably priced apparel. In its early stages, Shein was considered more of a drop shipping business than a retailer. In its early days, the company was not involved in clothing design and manufacturing, and instead obtained its products from the wholesale clothing market in Guangzhou. It was not until 2012 that Shein began to acquire its own supply chain system, transforming itself into a fully integrated retailer. The company has established its supply chain in Guangzhou with a network of more than 3,000 suppliers. Based in China and shipping across 150+ countries, Shein is the world's largest fashion retailer, as of 2022. The company was valued at $100 billion after a funding round in April 2022.

References

  1. ↑ "Ebates Acquires ShopStyle From PopSugar Inc". www.businesswire.com. 2017-02-24. Retrieved 2019-02-04.
  2. ↑ "ShopStyle: Expansion takes it from search to digital marketplace". fashionandmash.com. 23 February 2016.
  3. ↑ Shields, Mike (12 February 2016). "PopSugar Wants to Become the Mobile Shopping Cart for Fashion" – via Wall Street Journal.
  4. ↑ Indvik, Lauren. "ShopStyle Launches Product to Help Influencers Monetize Instagram". Fashionista. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
  5. ↑ "Roadster's Andy Moss: A Different Kind of Silicon Valley Entrepreneur". Roadster Blog. 2015-07-06. Retrieved 2019-02-04.
  6. ↑ "Roadster's Andy Moss: A Different Kind of Silicon Valley Entrepreneur". roadster.com. 6 July 2015.
  7. 1 2 "Social Shopping at ShopStyle". businessoffashion.com . 28 April 2009.
  8. ↑ "Trey Matteson". angel.co.
  9. ↑ "Garrick Toubassi: Executive Profile & Biography - Businessweek". bloomberg.com.
  10. ↑ "Mike Lenz". angel.co.
  11. ↑ "Sugar swallows Shopstyle — battle for women online continues". venturebeat.com.
  12. ↑ Malik, Om (2007-09-25). "Sugar Buys ShopStyle, Changes Name". gigaom.com. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
  13. ↑ Kiss, Jemima (17 November 2008). "Elevator Pitch: ShopStyle wants to do online fashion just that little bit better". theguardian.com.
  14. ↑ "ShopStyle Changing The Game For Bloggers & Retailers - Fashion Trends Daily". fashiontrendsdaily.com.
  15. ↑ "Ebates Acquires ShopStyle From PopSugar Inc". Bloomberg.com. 2017-02-24. Retrieved 2023-01-26.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.