Ebay Acquires “Content Meets Commerce” Shopping Site, Bureau Of Trade, As Its Personalization Efforts Heat Up

eBay has acquired online marketplace for men’s shopping Bureau of Trade, the company announced today. Founder Michael Phillips Moskowitz is joining the eBay Marketplaces team, where his focus will be on helping eBay improve its personalization efforts. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it was an all-cash deal and an “acceptable” and positive (if not stellar), outcome for Bureau of Trade’s investors. The startup had raised $1.2 million in seed funding in a round led by Foundation Capital, with contributions from Founder Collective, FF Angel, Courtney Holt on behalf of the Techfellows Fund, and other angel investors. The deal speaks to eBay’s increasing efforts to modernize its website by experimenting with new kinds of shopping experiences. The first results of Moskowitz’s work at eBay will be seen as early as this fall, we’re told. Though Moskowitz declined to discuss Bureau of Trade’s sales or user numbers, he said that the company’s blending of content meets commerce had proven to drive up the sales price for items on the site. “The average good on eBay will sell at X purchase price. That same piece of merchandise when covered by the Bureau – when written about by us – created in many instances a 50 to 100 percent price increase. That’s profoundly valuable,” he says. He hints that there’s something interesting in the works with what he’s learned through Bureau of Trade that’s now coming to eBay, but couldn’t provide details. Bureau of Trade remains online for now, and will have some sort of “big surprise in store this fall” with regards to its future. Sometime in either November or December, the site will introduce “something you’ve never seen before,” Moskowitz teased. (TechCrunch has seen quite a lot, actually, but he swears it will be new.) In fact, Moskowitz says he can’t even tell us his title at eBay, because it’s a role that has never before existed and would give away too much. eBay, he notes, now has his startup Bureau of Trade, plus other acquisitions like Svpply and Hunch, which he describes as a “triumvirate that’s uniquely positioned to do something catalytic and game-changing later this fall. We’re all working together symbiotically,” he says. As you may recall, eBay had first announced a Pinterest-inspired redesign last October, which featured an image grid and improvements to site search. That revamped homepage was then rolled out to all U.S. customers in February, with eBay touting

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