Rakuten’s Slice Acquires email Unsubscribe App Unroll.Me

TechCrunch, Monday, November 24, 2014 Slice, the purchasing and package deal tracking app got by way of Rakuten past this yr, has now made an acquisition of its own. It has offered Unroll.Me, an app that lets users roll up and take care of mass-e mail subscriptions and unsubscribe to people who have tipped into the point of being unnecessary spam. terms of the deal are not being disclosed, the companies inform me. Unroll.Me was a bootstrapped startup — no outdoor traders — and it had picked up 1.3 million users, which it calls “Rollers”, considering that first opening for business in 2011. That’s spectacular growth, considering that it only had 100,000 subscribers in August 2013. Unroll.Me is based totally in the big apple, and the two co-founders, Josh Rosenwald and Jojo Hedaya, are both joining Slice, which is run as a subsidiary of Rakuten. It marks the third U.S.-primarily based acquisition for Rakuten this year, after shopping for Slice in August and Ebates a month later for $1 billion. Put together, you will see that Rakuten is accumulating an interesting team of e-commerce firms which might be focused less on the direct purchasing and promoting of goods, but products and services that enhance the buying expertise each on Rakuten’s personal residences and somewhere else. this offers the corporate probably a powerful grip on purchaser information, which might prove to be treasured in its own right in a market the place this has transform an growing focal point. It also points to a rising maturity in the e-commerce market general: folks should buy issues anyplace but what offers one website an facet over the opposite is the buyer expertise: making things run easily and giving individuals the ability to get reductions in the course of. Unroll.Me, together with Slice and Ebates, all make contributions to that larger thought. Rollers, Rosenwald tells me, “will expertise no alternate in their service. It’s a popular and well-liked product, and we need to preserve it that way.” Unroll.Me is a free app that has prior to now made cash in keeping with ads that run inside its app. For now with the intention to stay the main business adaptation for the service. however while the 2 products and services are to stay standalone for now, it’s like that we will see more integrations beforehand.

“The alternatives for us to give a boost to individuals’s lives by way of creating worth from the ideas in email are limited only through our imaginations, so we see many avenues to grow the Unroll.me and Slice companies collectively through the creation of new apps and experiences. We’ll have extra new on this soon, stay tuned!” Rosenwald says. Unroll.Me is a departure but in addition a complement for Slice. prior to now Slice concentrated on serving to consolidate the purchasing expertise, bringing together both purchasing and shipment data from throughout totally different online outlets. Hut it has performed so by way of specializing in analysing data that comes by way of email. That’s where its variation meets that of Unroll.Me. “Slice and Unroll.Me are attacking the same downside—our inboxes are so cluttered that it’s nearly unattainable to search out the ideas that’s important,” Scott Brady, chief government officer at Slice, mentioned in a statement. “We began with purchasing, but we aren’t completed making email helpful again.” the main common sense in the back of selling up used to be scale, Rosenwald tells me — a typical chorus on the planet of e-commerce. “The Unroll.Me crew created a terrific product that achieved mass recognition based totally almost totally on individuals loving the expertise and sharing it with their friends,” he says. “with the aid of joining the Slice crew, we will proceed to develop and beef up the product even quicker with further tools in addition to work with an multiplied staff of extremely gifted individuals.” so far, Slice, which is based in Palo Alto, says it has processed over 175 million items with a purchase price of over $four billion.       Techcrunch MediaPost.com: email

(153)