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Ebay Acquires Men's “Content Meets Commerce” Shopping Site, Bureau Of Trade
Online marketplace for men’s shopping, Bureau of Trade, has been acquired by eBay, the company announced today. Founder Michael Phillips Moskowitz is joining the eBay Marketplaces team, where his focus will be on helping eBay improve their personalization efforts. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it was an all-cash deal and an “acceptable” and positive (if not stellar), outcome for Bureau of Trade’s investors.
The startup had raised $1.2 million in seed funding in a round led by Foundation Capital, with contributions from Founder Collective, FFAngel, Courtney Holt on behalf of the Techfellows Fund, and other angel investors.
The deal hints at eBay’s increasing efforts to modernize its website by experimenting with new kinds of shopping experiences. The first results of Moskowitz’s work at eBay will be seen as early as this fall, we’re told.
eBay had first announced a Pinterest-inspired redesign last October, which featured an image grid and improvements to site search. That revamped homepage was then rolled out to all U.S. customers in February, with eBay touting the more individualized feel it offered consumers, with product feeds that included items, brands and trends that matched up with users’ own interests and passions.
Moskowitz’s previous experience with Bureau of Trade, and before that, at Palo Alto design firm IDEO and in co-founding menswear label Gytha Mander, will now come into play at eBay, as the company continues its work in becoming a more personalized service. He’s joining the eBay team in New York, where, says eBay, he will “be helping eBay’s 120 million active users (as of June 30, 2013) discover items that match their individual tastes and preferences.”
Said Richelle Parham, CMO for eBay North America, eBay will now benefit from Moskowitz’s perspective of “exceptional goods with a story” in-house.
For background, Bureau of Trade launched last September – around the same time eBay launched its new homepage. The startup was an experiment in wrapping together content and commerce, to see if doing so would boost sales. According to investor Charles Moldow of Foundation Capital, whose firm led roughly 90 percent of the startup’s $1.2 million seed round, that thesis was proven correct: content absolutely helped drive sales. Whether or not that could scale, however, would have taken more time and investment. At the time of the acquisition, the company was trying to grow its audience, which was in the six figures.
Moldow said that Bureau of Trade’s unique position – one he said somewhat reminded him of the J. Peterman catalog parodied on Seinfeld – was why his firm even took the risk on Moskowitz’s content/e-commerce business. It wasn’t really an e-commerce company, he said. E-commerce businesses have high acquisition costs, low product margins and high churn. “That type of business would not interest us, but this was a social company, a content company, and a media business – it had a commerce element for monetization,” he explained.
Moldow facilitated the introduction between Moskowitz and eBay, after meeting with Devin Wenig, eBay’s President of Marketplaces. Wenig was already aware of and liked what Bureau of Trade was doing, probably because a majority of the merchandise the startup listed on its site was sourced from eBay sellers.
We reached out to eBay to find out more about their plans with Moskowitz, but the company has so far declined to provide much more beyond what they’ve already said publicly. All eBay would say for now is that later this fall, it will be rolling out additional updates and new features to the eBay homepage, which will involve some of Bureau of Trade’s learnings.
“Michael and his team are playing a pivotal role in this next phase, working closely with our product team to ensure these changes offer the optimal shopping experience combined with an editorial viewpoint for our global community. Stay tuned,” an eBay spokesperson told us.
Currently, Bureau of Trade website remains online, and does not include a mention of a forthcoming closure, acquisition or transition plan.
More to come.
Swiftype Raises $7.5M From NEA To Develop A Smarter Search Engine For Web And Mobile Sites
Swiftype, a Y Combinator-backed startup that creates a smarter search engine for websites, has raised $7.5 million led by NEA, with angel investors participating. The startup previously raised $1.7 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ignition, CrunchFund and angel investors. NEA partner Jon Sakoda will join Swiftype’s Board of Directors as part of the financing.
Founded in 2012, Swiftype basically adds a more intelligent, high-quality search engine for mobile and web-based sites and allows users to query and collect information more efficiently. The startup actually builds search engines in real-time, organizing pages based on importance rankings from your site. After creating your search engine, the Swiftype dashboard allows you to customize search results, by editing titles or deleting entries. You can even drag and drop queries from the dashboard in order of the ranking you want them to appear in. Installation is relatively simple–developers need to paste the supplied JavaScript code into a website.
The origin of the startup came from Matt Riley and fellow co-founder Quin Hoxie, who were both working as engineers on Scribd’s in-house search. They looked at a bunch of different options including open source solutions but realized there was an opportunity to provide a search technology that allowed for more curation and control. “Search can be one of the most powerful marketing tools,” says Riley. “It’s the clearest form of intent for site owners.”
It’s the data on the backend of Swiftype’s dashboard that can make a big difference for site owners. Not only can sites customize search results for certain keywords, but you can see what people are searching for and much more. You can also see what results aren’t very helpful to users, and tinker with search rankings.
The startup is also debuting its “Swiftype Platform,” which allows OEM partners to resell the service as a part of their solution to existing customers and partners. Swiftype is actually being resold to website security company CloudFlare’s customers. Through this partnership with Swiftype, CloudFlare can now offer site search as a service to its existing customers and new sites that sign up for CloudFlare.
In terms of the competition, Google, Attivio and Endeca all offer site search to companies, but some of these options can be complicated to implement and require servers and more. Swiftype search is can be added in minutes via its API, which Riley says helps scale search automatically and add users much faster.
Currently, the company’s API and developer tools power more than 200 million queries per month, up more than 20x in the past year. Swiftype is used by 100,000 sites including Best Buy, TwitchTV, Twilio, and Asana. Prices range from $20 to $300, with custom packages for enterprise solutions. It’s impressive that Swiftype is seeing major brands likes Best Buy adopt its technology. E-commerce sites, in particular, could really benefit from some of the analytics and data insights Swiftype can provide. And mobile search could be an interesting opportunity for the startup to help create more optimized experiences for owners.
We’re told the new funding will be put towards hiring additional engineering staff and building out the startup’s infrastructure.
Watch the demo of the product below.
*Disclosure: CrunchFund was started by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.
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