July 19, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Reviews Content Team
The popularity of Pixazza.com is paying off, as they just raised $12 million in Series B funding, which brings their total funding to roughly $20 million. Pixazza is not the typical ecommerce company, since their business is based upon an advertising platform that connects online photos with links to products that are similar to what the user sees in the photo. Web publishers are able to add a line of Javascript to the pages where they have photos that they want to monetize. Then when a user rolls over the image, they see links to similar products that they can purchase online. Pixazza is able to find similar products because they have an army of taggers who are paid on a commission model, based on users visiting or buying products from links they created. Advertisers work with Pixazza on different models including cost per click, cost per 1000 impressions, and cost per action where they are paid for each sale. Pixazza then shares a portion of their advertising revenue with publishers, in a very similar way that Google pays publishers who use AdSense on their sites. Google likes the business model so much that they were investors in the Series A and Series B funding rounds.
Pixazza plans on using the additional funding to continue to improve the product and expand into international markets. Last month they made upgrades to their Shopdot program which provides publishers with the ability to have a hosted and branded online storefront that showcases what products are most popular on their site. It determines popularity by looking at which products are receiving the most clicks by visitors to the site. The branded online storefronts give publishers an easy way to add ecommerce efforts to their site so they can better monetize the traffic. As more photos get added to the Internet, Pixazza wants to be there with a tagger to find similar products in the photo to link to an advertiser.
Scott is an avid fan of all things ecommerce. His claim to fame is that he "puts the Zip in ZippyCart." He considers himself the world-wide number one reader of TechCrunch, C|Net, and The Ecommerce Times. Scott has worked in the SEO industry for many years, but found himself always shifting his focus to review sites and ecommerce blogs. When we decided to start the ZippyCart Ecommerce news, Scott was an obvious fit. He handles most of our OpEds as he is a very opinionated guy. Scott is also our Twitter guy, so don't hesitate to send him a tweet if you see him online.
