Apple Wants To Buy Pinterest Rival, The Fancy
Apple is in talks to acquire The Fancy, a fast-growing social commerce site backed by cofounders of Twitter and Facebook, Business Insider has learned. — The objective: to secure a role for Apple in the growing e-commerce market …
Context & Ripple Effects
The report lands a week after the New York Times said Apple officials were weighing a stake in Twitter, and together the two paint a picture of a company probing how to buy its way into social and commercial activity happening off its devices. The Fancy matters here because it sits at the intersection Apple lacks: a Pinterest-style visual discovery feed wired directly to checkout, already backed by confirmed cofounders of Twitter and Facebook.
The pickup was unusually broad for an unconfirmed deal talk — ZDNet, CNET, PC Magazine, SlashGear and four other outlets ran the Business Insider scoop within a day, signaling how hungry coverage of Apple's e-commerce ambitions was in August 2012.
First-order effects
- If the rumored talks conclude, Apple gains an immediate consumer storefront and social graph outside iTunes, and The Fancy's Twitter- and Facebook-cofounder backers move inside Apple's orbit.
- The Fancy's team gets Apple's distribution and payment rails overnight, converting a venture-stage commerce site into a strategic asset rather than a standalone business.
Second-order effects
- Pinterest and other visual-commerce startups would face a consolidator with device-level reach, raising the price of every remaining discovery-commerce property and accelerating partner-or-sell decisions for their investors.
- Amazon and eBay would have to treat Apple as a demand-discovery threat, not just a hardware vendor, pushing them to deepen their own social and curation features.
Third-order effects
- The pattern — a hardware platform acquiring a taste-and-purchase layer — points toward commerce intent being owned at the operating-system level, with checkout embedded where discovery happens rather than on destination retail sites.
- If Apple keeps pursuing social assets after the Twitter discussions, large-platform M&A becomes the main exit path for mid-stage social commerce startups, reshaping which investors fund them.
The trend: Consumer tech platforms are shifting from building social and commerce features in-house to acquiring discovery-driven commerce startups outright, with Apple's 2012 courtship of Twitter and The Fancy as early data points.