Shopping site Fancy pokes at rivals, touts mobile success
The social-shopping site hits 2 million members and says it's beating competitors Pinterest and Fab on mobile despite a smaller user base.
Social-media and e-commerce site Fancy may not have Pinterest's 25.3 million users or even Fab's 8 million users, but what Fancy lacks in user numbers, the company says, it's making up in mobile traffic and, most importantly, sales.
Fancy, which recently raised another $26.4 million from investors, released some new numbers and announced its new gift card offerings today, touting its mobile success while taking the opportunity to ding its competitors.
Fancy has more than 2 million registered users now, and while that's much less than wildly popular social-media site Pinterest or growing e-commerce site Fab, the company says it's been averaging more than $200,000 sales each week.
A look at its performance in the Google Play Android App store shows that Fancy is going strong in its mobile downloads for Android. Though iTunes data isn't available, "we understand the trend is similar," Fancy COO Mike Silverman wrote in an e-mail sent to CNET.
Fancy's Android app has between 1 million to 5 million installs in the last 30 days with the graph showing rapid growth in the number of installs.
Pinterest, also had between 1 million to 5 million installs in the last 30 days, but with flat growth. Fab, which recently launched new mobile apps, has had 100,000 to 500,000 installs in the last 30 days, with a temporary spike in installs before leveling out.
"A strong desktop brand that clearly drives a lot of downloads, but the use-case of categorizing images may not be as strong on mobile as our pure in-app shopping use-case," Silverman wrote, taking a stab at Pinterest, which has been rapidly growing in popularity but without a clear business plan.
The company has tried to set itself apart from Pinterest, favoring a comparison with retail giant Amazon over the social-media site. Fancy has services you won't find on Pinterest, including the Fancy Box subscription service, that launched last month. Silverman said the service has more than 6,000 paying subscribers now, each paying $30 a month. Subscribers get a collection, valued at $60 or more, of the most popular items on Fancy each month.