Ebay Acquires Svpply | Hacker News Reader

Ebay Acquires Svpply

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90 pointscoupdegrace42 comments

Sigh. They even had a business model, too. Disappointed.

Looking forward to Svpply either (a) being slowly destroyed, or (b) shut down all together so the team can work exclusively on eBay's awful site. Congrats in advance to the team on cashing out 12/24/48 months from now.

When Salesforce.com acquired Heroku I was horrified that things were going to go downhill. Heroku has continued to get better and better as far as i'm concerned! Hopefully the trend of acquihires and product shutdown stops though.

There are definitely exceptions to the rule. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure eBay isn't one of them.

Salesforce has mostly bought things and kept it going

I felt the same way when they picked up Desk (formerly Assistly). I have been pleased that they continue to push the product forward since the acquisition.

Svpply's numbers have been pretty stuck for a while (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/120/Screenshots/tcr0.png) and they're competing in a market with tons of competitors that were doing better than them, specifically Wanelo (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/120/Screenshots/-~1c.png) but also Fancy (https://thefancy.com).

You have to become huge to create a VC-backable business on the back of other affiliate programs and it didn't look like they were on that path. This was a good move on their part.

I would argue that Pinterest was what crushed them

We should really stop using Compete as evidence for anything. Not only are they frequently an order of magnitude off, they're oftentimes not even directionally correct in their movements.

Other than that, your points are valid, especially wrt affiliate based companies.

Zach Klein is killing it. Co-founder of Vimeo, founder of Svpply. He's been involved in lots of other cool gigs too. It's been really fun to follow along with his progress over the last few years. Tons of respect for the guy, and glad that he has done most of this outside of SV. Congrats on the sale!

Oh, absolutely. Between Vimeo, Svpply, DIY, and his Cabin Porn blog (SFW, you should check it out if you haven't yet), he seems to have impeccable taste for things the internet could use. Huge props to him for everything.

Cabin Porn is super rad!

http://freecabinporn.com/

awesome site.

SFW?

Yes.

completely out of topic, but i'm really curious: the moment i saw those isolated cabins, all sorts of things that can go wrong popped up in my mind, especially safety issues. like, you can have armed fugitive stopped by and do nasty things to you. or, do they have like hidden sensor/perimeter or stuff?

It's possible that these things could happen. It's also possible that you are paranoid.

You have watched too many horror movies.

Zach Klein is a co-founder of Svpply with Ben Pieratt and Eric Jacobsen.

He's doing great things with DIY, too: https://diy.org

I would say that an acquihire of a struggling product that he was only marginally involved in, isn't the time to congratulate the guy. He was primarily an investor and probably just lost some money

"With Svpply.com, eBay gains access to technology talent to further improve the shopping and selling experience for its customers. Svpply.com assets – including a talented team of six designers and developers – are well-suited to help eBay advance more personalized experiences and merchandising options on eBay.com."

Doesn't really sound like EBay is excited about Svpply as much as it is about the team. But can the vision that drives and motivates the team of an awesome startup like Svpply exist inside a giant corporation?

I can't help but wonder if this is one of those "bail out" style acquisitions we hear about. Although it's mostly conjecture, I had definitely heard rumblings of them not doing well as of late. I hope the team and founders did well with this.

I am saddened that another small and awesome startup will be sucked into the bureaucratic conglomerate that is eBay/PayPal.

On the other hand, I am happy these guys got their payday. They built an awesome site and totally deserve it.

Here's to hoping that eBay doesn't screw up the site too badly...

I don't care about their payday if it means another useful tool disappears.

I don't think its going anywhere -- at least that isn't the plan: http://blog.svpply.com/post/31008753911/ebay-inc-acquires-sv...

On another note, if you truly find the site useful, you should be interested in its longevity. For all you know, a team of 7+ with an affiliate sales model and only 60,000 monthly uniques may not have been able to sustain this product without interest from a larger corporate entity.

In essence, a sale is not synonymous with disappearance, and sometimes it can even _ensure_ the opposite.

The distinguishing factor in this era of the Web is that now acquisitions are treated with dismay rather than celebration. Web 3.0 is much more cynical toward the big corporations (and in my opinion, rightly so).

It turns out the CEO of svpply had some ideas what to do with the company. I am surprised no one has mentioned this post http://pieratt.tumblr.com/post/5450242474/my-job-pt-1-i-have...

I was going to mention this post. I still think it was genuine and that he has "no idea of what he is doing" as he is saying. Otherwise if he had a true vision of his own business he wouldn't have sold, wouldn't he ?

I interned at Skillshare up until late July, and we shared an office space with Svpply. They are a cool bunch of guys and they seemed to be working pretty hard this summer. I wish them the best at Ebay.

Is this the second NYC acquisition by ebay (the other I know of is Hunch)?

This is disappointing from a user perspective. I always loved to use svpply to find well done and niche products. I'm not sure what eBay is going to do with it, but I expect it to go downhill from here.

Awesome news, but I kind of felt Svpply had a very broad focus. I'm interested in seeing what some of the newer startups in this segment, with a more specific focus, will fair out (eg. http://lover.ly for weddings, http://www.threadmatcher.com for clothes and footwear, http://www.grandst.com for gadgets).

Vimeo is a pain though. It does not work well without Flash, as does YouTube. player.vimeo.com/config/12345678.smil will give some mp4 url's but they require the request to come from their swf or some other annoying impediment. Not everyone always has a super fast connection or uses Flash all the time. With YouTube that's not a problem. With Vimeo, it is.

via Svpply blog:

>We created Svpply three years ago with the goal of creating a unified online retail shopping experience by bringing shoppers, tastemakers and merchants onto a single site. Today, we couldn’t be happier to announce that we’ve been acquired by eBay Inc.

>One thing we do want to make clear: Svpply is not going away. We’ll continue to bring our users new products each day — allowing our loyal fans to explore beautiful products and stores, all of them hand selected by the community.

>Our talented team will help eBay expand its focus on merchandising, discovery and browsing. Together, we’ll work to create improved and personalized experiences and merchandising options for eBay.com.

>We’re excited to join the eBay and Hunch teams in the new state-of-the-art technology development center in New York City!

Anybody know how much? Congrats!

I really like Svpply and I don't find myself using it so much. Maybe we'll see some nice integration with eBay, or possibly keep running as it is, either way congratulations to the team.

Looking forward to what's coming next.

Yeah Ben!! Congrats!

Congrats team. Very few people every make it to the finish line of an exit, and for those that do, you inspire the rest!

Awesome news, both for Svpply and for Ebay which I see increasingly trying to be in Amazon's space.

Founder Collective is killing it. Second startup to get acquired by eBay (first was Hunch).

Exits. I need to learn now to do that.

Ebay + Hunch + Svpply + Milo = ?

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