Google Ventures Backed-Copious Launches A Social Marketplace For The Facebook Era
Social commerce has taken on many forms; from purchasing items on Facebook to product recommendations from your social graph to daily deal sites. There are plenty of startups that offer the functionality listed above …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has spent the past year pulling commerce onto its platform: Business Week reported in December 2010 that Facebook was ramping up an e-commerce drive (Facebook Ramps Up Big E-Commerce Drive), and by April 2011 it was positioning itself against Groupon and LivingSocial on daily deals (Facebook Is Latest Rival to Groupon and LivingSocial). The playbook traces back further — Facebook's 2007 social ad network already promised to target buyers through their friends (What We (Think We) Know So Far about the Social Ad Network).
Copious enters that current from the other direction: rather than a brand selling inside Facebook, it is a standalone marketplace whose trust and discovery layers are built on the social graph, with Google Ventures' confirmed investment putting Google money behind the thesis that identity-rich selling beats anonymous listings.
First-order effects
- Sellers on Copious get a marketplace where reputation and discovery run through real identities rather than pseudonymous feedback scores, directly attacking eBay- and Craigslist-style anonymity.
- Google Ventures gains an early position in social commerce at the moment Facebook itself is pushing hardest into transactions.
Second-order effects
- Daily-deal players like Groupon and LivingSocial, which Facebook already targets per the April coverage, now face a third model — social-graph marketplaces — competing for the same merchant budgets.
- Every marketplace built on borrowed identity deepens its dependence on Facebook's data and API decisions, giving Facebook leverage over startups that nominally compete with it.
Third-order effects
- If identity-backed listings prove out, marketplace competition shifts from inventory and price to whoever controls the trust layer — a structural advantage for platform owners over the startups renting their graphs.
- The pattern echoes the 2007 ad-network debate: when commerce runs through the social graph, the graph owner captures value regardless of which startup wins, pointing toward eventual consolidation around platform-controlled storefronts.
The trend: Commerce is migrating onto the social graph, and venture capital is betting that standalone social marketplaces can ride platforms they do not control.