Yahoo has announced plans to acquire leading social shopping website Polyvore. The purchase will add to Yahoo's digital publishing offering, powering native shopping ads to drive traffic and increase sales.
Polyvore users pull together fashion, beauty and lifestyle products from different retailers, creating a personalised and social shopping experience. In a statement, Simon Khalaf, Senior Vice President of Publisher Products at Yahoo, said: "Polyvore has built an excellent team, a category leading product, and a strong business based on a highly engaged community. The combination of Yahoo's industry-leading digital content with Polyvore's expertise in community and commerce has outstanding potential. We are thrilled to have the Polyvore team join us."
Yahoo plans to use Polyvore's technology to enhance its advertising, using a proven native ad model alongside new ad formats. The shopping site also has strong links with more than 350 retail brands, adding to Yahoo's growing native advertising platform, Yahoo Gemini.
After the sale completes, Polyvore products and services will continue as usual but with added Yahoo support. The company's staff will join one of Yahoo's offices in San Francisco and New York.
Jess Lee, Co-Founder and CEO at Polyvore, said: "I'm delighted to join Yahoo. Our core mission of empowering people to feel good about their style will remain the same, but with Yahoo's help we'll be able to make Polyvore even bigger and better for our user community. I'm also excited that we'll be able to deliver more scale to our advertisers by integrating our ad offerings into Yahoo Gemini."