Wanelo: A Social Shopping Site That Small Businesses Are Thriving On. Investors spend $2M on Wanelo, a social store that looks a lot like Pinterest. Shopping for the next e-commerce hit, investors have spent $2 million on budding startup Wanelo, an online shopping community where regular people share their uncommon finds.
Wanelo, a blend of the words “want, need, love,” is a combination of product-inspiration and social shopping sites such as Pinterest, Fancy, and Polyvore, and is meant to be a store curated by users. “Wanelo is a movement of regular people who help each other find things they like, and most of these things are affordable,” Wanelo CEO and founder Deena Varshavskaya told VentureBeat. “Wanelo is about unique things you can actually buy.” The comparisons to Pinterest is practically unavoidable — members find and save products to personal collections — but Wanelo moves beyond the aspirational and encourages members to swap affordable treasures for their shopping wish-lists. “Users go to Pinterest to find or collection inspiration; they go to Wanelo to shop,” said Varshavskaya. Photo credit: andrewarchy/Flickr. Wanelo, encore un site de social shopping. Wanelo, mix des mots want, need et love, est un nouveau site social qui mélange curation à la Pinterest et e-shopping classique un peu à la Etsy.
Comme Shopcade, Wanelo permet aux utilisateurs de se créer un profil, de faire des listes de leurs produits préférés, de suivre les trouvailles de leurs amis, et bien sur de faire des achats. “Wanelo est une communauté de gens ordinaires qui aident les autres à trouver les choses qu’ils aiment, et la plupart de ces choses sont abordables”, explique Deena Varshavskaya, fondateur et PDG de la startup, à VentureBeat. Quand on lui demande comment Wanelo se positionne par rapport à Pinterest, il répond simplement: “Les utilisateurs vont sur Pinterest pour trouver l’inspiration et constituer des collections, ils vont sur Wanelo pour faire des emplettes”.
Depuis sa création en 2010 à San Francisco, Wanelo a vu ses utilisateurs partager plus de 1.3M de produits provenant de 24 000 boutiques différentes! Alors, sympa non? Wanelo Raises $2M … But Is Distilling Pinterest To Products The Right Idea? From Fab to Netflix to Amazon, the eCommerce world is starting to warm up to the future of online shopping: Social curation.
Call it the “Pinterest-effect” — People are embracing the idea that bookmarking and social sharing slowly are replacing search with regards to product discovery. And this is leaving many investors salivating at the prospect of Pinterest’s eventual revenue model. Taking this idea one iteration further, Wanelo, like OpenSky and other Pinterest-offshoots, is a site that allows users to bookmark and share their favorite products via a grid layout and high-res imagery. Ostensibly the startup wants to find a quicker path to profitability by focusing only on the curation of things that bring in revenue.
Makes sense. Unlike OpenSky, the startup allows you to follow your Facebook friends in addition to top site users — resulting in a more personalized product feed than that of just celebrity selections. Products trending today on Wanelo.