eBay have acquired Svpply.com, a company that aims to recreate offline window shopping in an online experience. Svpply describe themselves as a curated collection of the world’s best products and stores.
Every product in Svpply’s Shop section has been selected by hand by one of their members, and brought to the site using Svpply’s bookmarklet. As well as a bookmarking site to keep track of products you like. Svvply will show you products you may like, based on your friends on Twitter and Facebook. They want to help you discover products you might want from other users, and allows users to display galleries of items they want or own.
eBay say the acquisition of Svpply “gains access to technology talent to further improve the shopping and selling experience for its customers” and that “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”.
I have two questions. Firstly can anyone please tell me how to pronounce “Svpply”?
More importantly is the curated approach good enough to add value to eBay? They tried with Stumbleupon, failed and sold the company back to the founders. eBay purchased Hunch, but we’ve yet to see much materialise from that acquisition although it’s still early days. Is Svpply the answer to get eBay showing me products I want to buy and more importantly stop showing Dan Moccasins and Mini Skirts, neither of which he will ever purchase?
8 Responses
showing Dan Moccasins and Mini Skirts,
Ok there is a mental image that will haunt my day!!
How to pronounce Svpply. Don’t I remember that in the Roman Alphabet there was just a “v” the “u” did not turn up until much later. So perhaps this was their thinking when they originally settled on the name “Svpply”. In other words it is said Supply but written as a Roman would have written it some 1600 odd years ago. Just a thought.
The “V” is a “U”, so it’s just pronounced as supply. In Latin lowercase there is a “u” but not in uppercase.
So you can only sensibly keep the V if you are writing their name in capitals; “svpply” just looks silly.
Surely it was called “SVPPLY” as supply.com was too expensive?