Payvment’s grown rapidly in its first year, fast enough for the Facebook shopping site to find itself in need of more talent and larger digs while it considers how bank involvement can enhance the business model.
The eCommerce platform, which allows retailers to create their own online storefronts where Facebook’s 500 million users can shop without leaving Facebook, just received $6 million in Series B funding from Sierra Ventures. In the site’s first year, it’s demonstrated the ability of Facebook to enable explosive growth—more than 40,000 global retailers already use the platform with more than 750,000 searchable products.
The site will use its new infusion to hire talent with experience in engineering, online community support, product integration and other expertise. It will also open a new headquarters in Palo Alto.
While Payvment has thus far used PayPal to enable merchants to accept payments, the site’s hoping to forge closer ties to banks as Payvment grows larger in the coming year.
Christian Taylor, founder and CEO of Payvment, says there’s been interest from retailers to leverage bank merchant accounts to accept card or debit payments, something the site has not been able to offer yet, in part because of its relatively small staff.
“In the first year, we were interested in finding out if people would shop on Facebook. There are still only ten of us here. In the next year, we’ll be adding engineers and focusing on products in which [retailers] can bring their own bank merchant accounts,” says Taylor, adding that involvement of other payments firms such as banks would exist in addition to PayPal, and not act as a replacement.
What do you think about this? Send us your feedback.
