€400,000 for VendorShop to fund Facebook plug-in

VENDORSHOP, which offers tools to businesses looking to sell through Facebook, has raised €400,000 in funding from Enterprise Ireland and private investors.

The Irish start-up’s managing director, Chris Small, said it planned to use the investment, which values the company at €1 million, to further develop its product. The company will then raise further funding to help rapid customer expansion.

“We want to accelerate very quickly but having said that, the most important thing for us is to continue to develop this knowledge we have got and build it within the application in order to help merchants sell more,” Mr Small said.

“We have started to do that and to a degree the numbers will take care of themselves and it will be much easier to scale quickly.”

VendorShop, a graduate of the DCU Ryan Academy Propeller Accelerator Fund, offers businesses a free Facebook plug-in that helps them turn their social media page into a sales channel. Mr Small said the next six to 12 months would be spent improving the product based on feedback and interactions with merchants.

The company will increase its staff to 10 in the months ahead, with plans to double that in 2013.

Mr Small said the incentive for businesses to use VendorShop was that the system could help build customer loyalty through special offers for “fans”, which in turn could create a long-term increase in sales.

“We have a wine merchant who made over €20,000 in sales in November because they were providing a special experience to Facebook fans,” he said.

The system uses PayPal to process payments, carries McAfee and Verisign security certification and the purchases were made entirely on Facebook itself.

Mr Small said this helped to put most people’s security fears at rest.

While Facebook was undergoing a number of significant changes, Mr Small added he was confident this would help, rather than hinder, VendorShop’s offering.

He had no fear of Facebook creating a competing product in the future.

“Facebook have clearly shown that they’re focused on other areas, particularly growing their core advertising business,” he said.

“We help build that ecosystem and there’s no suggestion of that changing.

“It would be a dangerous precedent for them to set if they did [launch a competing merchant plug-in], because it would make all developers think twice about their Facebook apps.”