Atrinsic, Inc. announced today its acquisition of Shopit.com, an e-commerce platform that enables buyers and sellers to reach the audiences of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Through offering the option to buy and sell anywhere one wants, Shopit opens the door to some of the largest consumer markets. ShopIt is the latest property to join the Atrinsic Media network as a part of the company’s effort to develop rich media properties across its extensive distribution platform.
Earlier versions of this innovative application have been downloaded nearly 800,000 times, demonstrating its ability to engage audiences in the fastest growing area of the Internet: social media. Internet consumer bases continue to grow, creating a more extensive organic audience and advertising inventory that Atrinsic will now control.
With its upcoming release, ShopIt will make establishing unique storefronts for simplified online transactions seamless by providing enhanced tools for storefront management, merchandising, payments and shipping. It will also provide tools that enable sellers to import existing listings from e-commerce sites such as eBay and Yahoo Stores. The new application can be accessed through mobile devices, broadening the sellers’ audience.
CEO of Atrinsic, Burton Katz, stated, “This acquisition fits perfectly with Atrinsic’s continuing transformation into a cross-platform digital content and marketing services network. Our ability to cost-effectively drive a larger audience conducting commerce within the ShopIt social media application, employ a toolbar product providing constant presence on the user’s desktop, and develop a ShopIt mobile application to be introduced during the second half of the year aims to catapult us into both the social and mobile commerce markets with blazing speed.”
Katz added, “The growing consumer demand for these types of rich applications across the traditional Internet portals, the social web, and mobile media fits our business model exceptionally well and positions us to address and monetize a large and growing market.”
Atrinsic believes the current macro-environment for funding early and mid-stage startups may create additional opportunities to buy formidable product and content and media assets at attractive valuations. The transaction has closed effective July 31, 2009, and the company will comment further on this and additional product initiatives in its upcoming investor conference call.
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