PriceGrabber Acquires Snapette

Mobile shopping app Snapette is getting a new home. The company, which has 1.5 million users, is being acquired by e-commerce platform and shopping site PriceGrabber for an undisclosed sum.

“The addition of Snapette reinforces our commitment to investing in mobile ecommerce and expands the PriceGrabber platform to more effectively reach fashion shoppers,” Jeff Goldstein, president of PriceGrabber, said in a statement. “In the last year we have seen accelerating growth in mobile and our acquisition of Snapette further extends the capabilities that we can deliver to our consumer audience and our merchant and publisher partners. Mobile commerce, including innovation around location based offers, is central to our future.”

For Snapette, it’s a play for scale. The company boasts partnerships with over 200 brands and retailers worldwide, but PriceGrabber puts millions of shoppers in touch with more than 12,000 merchants and sellers, driving more than $1 billion in annual sales. The smaller company will get access to “PriceGrabber’s breadth of relationships with retailers and publishers, as well as deep expertise in connecting retailers with consumers, [which] will accelerate Snapette’s penetration of both local and online commerce,” co-founder Sarah Paiji said in the release.

Paiji went further during a phone interview with Street Fight: “Our products started with an exclusive focus on local, but some of the feedback we had been getting from the users was that they would like to be able to purchase right through the app or that some smaller boutiques wanted people to be able to purchase nationally,” she said. “Ecommerce wasn’t our core competency and we were talking to companies that had extensive product catalogs and relationships with a number of retailers. That led us to PriceShopper. We were talking about how we could integrate some of their product catalog into our app and eventually it made sense to talk about an acquisition.”

PriceGrabber, meanwhile, gains access to the high-value female customers who are Snapette’s primary users. “Snapette’s pioneering mobile app changes the landscape for local fashion commerce. With PriceGrabber, we will create scalable value across all platforms,” the company’s other co-founder Jinhee Ahn Kim said in a statement.

All nine of Snapette’s current employees will move to PriceGrabber, but the team will remain in New York instead of moving to Los Angeles where the larger company is based. “We haven’t lost anyone in the process. From the user side, nothing is going to change,” Paiji told Street Fight. “PriceGrabber is giving us a lot of room. They are a company that has been around for some time now, and they want to protect a little of our startup feeling.”

Noah Davis is a senior editor at Street Fight.