Yardsellr is announcing today that it has closed a $5 million Series A funding round led by Accel Partners.
Harrison Metal, which is run by investor Michael Dearing and gave the social listings and transactions site seed financing last year, also participated in the round.
Yardsellr says it uses “social plumbing to power all interactions between buyers and sellers, although users create listings and consummate transactions.”
Welcome to eBay, Facebook-style!
Online shopping with a social element is starting to boom, at least in terms of financings.
Earlier today, Svpply–a social retail discovery site stocked with stuff you and your friends think are cool–got a $550,000 seed round investment led by Spark Capital and Founder Collective, along with high-profile angels like Ron Conway, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and former Myspace co-President Jason Hirschhorn.
And Topguest, a check-in loyalty service that was founded just five months ago, announced last week that it nabbed $2 million in Series A funding, as well as nabbing well-known Facebook investor Peter Thiel as an adviser.
Yardsellr takes yet another social tack, organizing the Internet shopping experience around “Blocks”–using the traditional neighborhood yard sale as an analog inspiration for innovation.
Blocks are micro-communities of people interested in the same products, determined via social networking, specifically following them on Twitter or liking them on Facebook.
Founder Daniel Leffel said in an email that it was better to organize this way “instead of categories, because categories organize products while Blocks organize people.”
Then, he said, when sellers list items, for free, they go out into the feeds of members who have joined the relevant blocks. Sellers can then buy additional traffic to their listings.
Yardsellr also handles payments for sales, with the buyer paying a small transaction fee.
That’s opposite from eBay, where Leffel once worked. Several former eBay execs are also working at the start-up.
From Yardseller
We believe people are natural-born buyers and sellers. In the tradition of neighborhood garage- and yard-sales, we make it easy for you to sell or buy whatever you want. Best of all, the buying and selling is done by regular people like you. That means you get great prices from folks you can trust within your network or within a friend's network.
When you put something up for sale, Yardsellr will spread the word about your item within your online neighborhood: "blocks" of other Yardsellr-s who love what you love, and in the news feeds of millions of Yardsellr fans on Facebook. No matter where they are online, Yardsellr finds other folks who are buying what you are selling.
For the buyer, Yardsellr is just as easy. Sites like Craigslist and eBay have become pretty crowded and hard to use. It's tough to know who you can trust and even harder to find great deals from everyday people. When you join any "block" on Yardsellr -- whether it's Jewelry, Star Wars, Baseball Cards, Scrapbooking, or Hello Kitty, or any of the the other 4,000+ blocks -- you get first crack at buying thousands of items listed by sellers at fantastic Yardsellr prices. Checkout is a breeze -- just pay with any credit card and the seller will send your item directly to you.
Buying and selling is always fun with Yardsellr, but so is the conversation in the blocks. Blocks are loaded with people who love what you love and there are thousands of comments and conversations to join. (To be honest, that's just as important to us as the cash register.) Give it a try!
Beneath the coupled gold faints the painless catalog
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