Abbey Post is a plus-size fashion marketplace and community. The company just released a totally rebuilt version of the site, which now features an internal social network and expanded inventory. It takes an Etsy-style approach where anyone, from independent designers to established brands, can sell their wares.

“I chose this model of peer-to-peer commerce specifically because I want to build community,” Schames said in an interview. “Plus-size women feel really disenfranchised, neglected, and left out of conversations about fashion. There are many people who think fat ladies aren’t sexy and don’t care what they look like, even though there are over 100 million plus-size women in the US. If you give them a platform to connect over fashion and buy clothes that make them feel good, that math adds up real fast.”

After leaving her sales job, Schames gained e-commerce experience by founding an online consignment store for luxury accessories. She is a plus-size women herself and was drawn to handbags and jewelry because they are size agnostic. As a professional in New York City, she said it was consistently difficult to find plus-size clothing because a lot of brands are pulling their plus-size clothes out of stores and moving sales entirely online. However, none of the online retailers provided particularly appealing options and none incorporated the social element that makes shopping enjoyable for many women. Schames repeatedly had conversations with women who felt marginalized in the same way and realized there was a bigger opportunity out there.

“I’m not sure who told people that size 14 and up love polyester, but it’s not true,” she said. “Plus-size women are tired of going to the mall and looking through two abandoned racks in the back. Fashion is aspirational and today’s runway model averages a size zero. That does not reflect a majority of women. The fashion industry wants to fetishize thinness and sell us this fantasy, but it’s not real life and it pisses me off. I have a daughter and I don’t want her growing up feeling bad because she isn’t like the magazine. Part of our mission is telling women it is OK to love who you are. I am working hard to bring a positive and accepting and inclusive environment to normal women.”

Social e-commerce and peer-to-peer commerce are trendy right now and changing the experience of shopping online. The e-commerce sector didn’t see too much innovation for many years — brands and retailers put their inventory online and shoppers searched for what they were looking for. Recently, a wave of fashion startups such as Wanelo, Luvocracy, Etsy, Poshmark, and Polyvore have taken various approaches to transforming this experience and finding new ways to browse and buy products online. At a recent media dinner about social e-commerce, Angel List founder Naval Ravikant (who is an investor in Wanelo) said this is the future of shopping.

Abbey Post is using these new models to target an underserved and highly valuable market. It is a passion project that addresses a widespread and unique set of needs. There are other plus-size online retailers out there like Avenue.com, Fashion to Figure, SimpleBe, Jessica London, and OneStopPlus, but Schames said her focus on high-end clothing and her social approach sets AbbeyPost apart. She also said there are products and features in the pipeline that will make Abbey Post an innovative tech company, rather than just a tech-enabled one.

AbbeyPost is bootstrapped and based in New York.

Social e-commerce site, Luvocracy has raised $11.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, RPM Ventures, XG Ventures, CrunchFund, Marissa Mayer, Ali Pincus, Jim Lanzone, and Tony Robbins.

Bing Gordon, partner at Kleiner Perkins will also be joining the Luvocracy board.

Luvocracy is a San Francisco-based startup that lets you buy products you “luv” based on recommendations from the people you trust. You can also earn rewards if someone buys a product you recommend.

“Recommendations are an ancient thing; it’s different than reviews,” said Nathan Stoll, chief executive, and co-founder of Luvocracy, in an interview, recalling the story of his grandmother who sold Avon products. “It’s part of the way we think. It’s someone you know and trust saying: ‘Go get that.’”

Stoll, an early Googler, co-founded Aardvark, the first social search engine, which was acquired by Google in 2010, sending him back to his alma mater.

His current co-founder, Roger Barnett, was founder and chief executive of Beauty.com and the chief of Arcade Marketing.

Luvocracy layers the social graph on top of a direct sales model to enable a world of curated commerce, according to the company’s website. It competes with popular social commerce startup Wanelo. 

The company has recruited one of Pinterest’s most influential users, Christine Martines, who has a following of over 5.5 million users, to quickly build a community of early users.

“Luvocracy as a technology is about connecting the right recommenders and making it possible to take their social content and make it seamlessly buyable,” a rep from the company told VentureBeat. ”It does that with a blend of algorithms and human support to make sure it’s done right.”

Image Credit: Luvocracy

Far too cheap.

Beauty products retailer and digital trailblazer Sephora says that per-capita, its Pinterest followers spend more money than its Facebook followers, and not just a little bit more. In fact, Pinterest users spend 15 times more on Sephora products than Facebook followers, Sephora’s head of digital Julie Bornstein told me this morning.

“The reality is that when you’re in the Pinterest mindset, you’re actually interested in acquiring items, which is not what people go to Facebook for,” Bornstein said. “Facebook continues to be just a great customer interaction tool that gives us the real-time ability to dialog with our customer; it’s a big customer-service venue for us.”

Ouch.

If you’re Facebook, that’s gotta hurt. You’ve just been downgraded from the bright and shining future of social shopping to the back office hell of customer support.

Sephora jumped on Pinterest hard, mostly because its largely-female marketing team were enthusiastic early adopters. When the company re-launched its website in April last year, it was one of the first retailers to integrate the ‘Pin It’ button sitewide. Individual users share their lists of what Sephora products they love and why — rather than just a putting together a list of fashion products, they can use Pinterest to tell a visual story about why a certain eyeshadow is so great and seek to inspire others. And a dedicated resource on the Sephora digital team helps Sephora staff craft Pinterest strategies.

All of which has made an impact.

Sephora’s following on Facebook is still huge and significant, at 4.7 million fans. And it’s a critical early-warning system for the company. “We hear instantly” about what people love and don’t love, Bornstein says, and Sephora clients connect with each other on the platform, giving each other fashion and beauty tips and advice.

But in terms of immediately measurable commercial impact? Pinterest is currently unmatched.

“E-commerce really is still in the first innings of really leveraging the power of social,” Bornstein says. “But we’ve experimented a lot with social shopping, and this is the first one that has really gotten to scale.”

photo credit: cobalt123 via photopin cc, swanky via photopin cc

When I was a teenager, I spent a good amount of time on the Internet, chatting with my girlfriends, downloading the latest emo rock ballad, and looking up flirting tips.

Tyler Simpson (14) and Brandon Keller (15) also spend a lot of time online. However, instead of channeling their energy into adolescent angst, they are building a company.

Their startup OrbitFront connects businesses with reviewers. As the popularity of Amazon and Yelp demonstrate, people love to express their opinions online. On the flip side, retailers want to capitalize on social media and customer feedback to drive sales.

OrbitFront brings vendors and reviewers together. Brand partners post products that they want people to review. Users can request a test unit, write up their experience of the product, and make referral money from people who purchase through their affiliate link.

The duo have a goal of 20 partners and 50 products, spanning multiple categories, by the end of the year. They acknowledge that starting a company takes hard work, but they said they’re up to the challenge.

“We have a philosophy at OrbitFront,” Simpson said. “Age is just a label that doesn’t say a whole lot about a person’s capabilities. What does is their patience and drive.

OrbitFront is founded on the belief that people trust human reviews more than advertising, and that “social media is the next big thing in marketing and commerce.”

Regardless of how the company fares with fundraising, which they are actively pursuing, or the online community, the founders’ strong resemblance to the Jonas Brothers should at least guarantee success with girls.

OrbitFront is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Commerce has always been social. Shopping in the real world is a form of social entertainment, and we turn to people we know for advice on products and services.

This social dimension, however, is not yet reflected in today’s search-driven online ecommerce sites.

I’ve been deeply focues on social commerce within the Facebbok ecosystem for more than three years already, building out Oodle’s classifieds service, and I’ve learned three core lessons that I think are broadly applicable to anyone working in the social commerce space.

1. Make your user experience more like TV than search
Users tune in to Facebook to be entertained or to discover new things. It’s an experience driven by browsing and serendipity. Today’s commerce experiences, however, are search-driven. They expect users to show up with intent. Amazon and eBay are great places to buy something once you’re already in the market to buy, but they fall short for people who want to browse or “window shop” as a form of entertainment. To embrace social commerce, a new layer needs to be added to the top of the e-commerce purchase funnel, one fueled by serendipity and browsing. If you engage users in this way, they’ll tune in more frequently (not just to buy something) and buy more things (that they discover socially).

One company that does this exceedingly well on TV is QVC. QVC shoppers tune in to shop with people they know – hosts and celebrities, as well as other members of the QVC community who call in. The experience, which is based on shared stories, is about discovering great new items rather than searching for specific ones.

2. Engage social circles beyond friends
Facebook defines its social experience through friends. A consumer’s buying behavior, however, is also typically informed by broader social circles of trust that include friends, neighbors, and co-workers (for example, when picking a real estate agent); circles of taste or shared interest (for example, when shopping for a new pair of black leather boots); and circles of expertise (for example., when researching the right digital telescope).

To fully engage in social commerce, you need to build your own graph – one that complements Facebook’s. Buying and sharing activity can be used to define broader social circles beyond friends – such as other people who share a love of gourmet cooking or are frequent business travelers. At the end of the day, this is really the social evolution of customer relationship management. Traditional CRM lets you to identify your customers so you can personalize the user experience based on a user’s profile. Social CRM is about knowing your communities of customers beyond users and users’ friends. This lets you socially personalize the experience based not only on a user’s profile but also on what that user’s communities are doing. For example, when a user is shopping for a suitcase, it would be helpful for an Amazon or an eBay to know which ones have been purchased, recommended or even looked at by friends, co-workers, and other business travelers.

3. Build out a footprint on Facebook
Having a native footprint (or “store within a store”) on Facebook is critical for two reasons. First, to get the social flywheel rolling, you need to effectively engage users through the NewsFeed on Facebook. Sharing activity distributed to friends through the NewsFeed is best converted and propagated within Facebook where users are already in a social context. Oodle sees four times better social engagement (in terms of getting people to connect, share, comment, etc.) if we take users from the NewsFeed into our Marketplace application on Facebook (vs. out of Facebook to Oodle.com).

Second, it’s hard to aggressively integrate social on a traditional e-commerce site that is well tuned for converting users within a search-driven experience. It’s much easier to innovate with social commerce on Facebook where users expect a truly social experience. Indeed, the emerging best practice for social is to establish two points of presence: one on Facebook optimized for a deep social experience, the other a web presence where social is more lightly applied (and remains optimized for an intent-based funnel).

These three insights are grounded in one key idea: Social commerce requires more than the proliferation of share and connect buttons within the e-commerce funnel. It requires us to produce a truly new commerce experience in which users show up to shop (not just buy), and in which the interaction model revolves around other people who share their interests and passions.

Craig Donato is CEO of Oodle, which operates a network of online marketplaces with more than 15 million monthly unique visitors, including the Oodle Marketplace and Marketplace on Facebook.

[Top photo credit: Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock]

LuxeYard, a new flash sale site focused on luxury home furnishings and decor, delivers a fresh feature to the daily deal market: it lets its customers request which items they want offered at a discount. The site launched Monday evening with $3.5 million in funding from private investors.

The company has two notable features not seen on other flash sale sites: Concierge Buying and Group Buy. Concierge Buying lets customers request items they’d like to buy at a discounted price. Any product can be submitted and voted on by the LuxeYard community and the most popular products will be offered for sale. LuxeYard works with the manufacturer to make the product available to its customers. If LuxeYard can’t offer the exact item, it will find a substitute of equal or higher quality.

LuxeYard’s Group Buy feature lowers the price of an item as more people purchase it. By broadcasting the discount on social platforms such as Facebook, customers can drive up the demand for the deal and lower the purchase price. Once the deal is over, everyone who purchased the product pays the lowest final price.

“We are using this round of funding for a number of important aspects of our startup. Because we are a new kind of flash sale site that fills two significant holes in our industry – community and personalization – we are focusing our dollars on parts of our site that are giving our members a unique experience,” said LuxeYard CEO Braden Richter in a statement to VentureBeat. “To make this happen, we are also spending on a number of other parts of our business, including software development, focus on getting member bases up, accounting and hiring new members for our team, as we expect to grow in the same vein as flash sale sites have been.”

One King’s Lane operates in the same space as LuxeYard, offering home furnishings at similar discounts. LuxeYard is relying on its Concierge Buying and Group Buy features to set itself apart from One King’s Lane and its other competition.

Art e-commerce website Rise Art sees a disconnect between artists and the digital world. It aims to reconnect the two today, with new social features and an undisclosed round of funding.

When Rise Art co-founder Scott Phillips saw his wife, an amateur painter, and her fellow artists having trouble connecting to galleries, customers and critics in an increasingly digital world, he set out to create a website that met those needs. Artist needs in addition to the needs of customers who were also wondering where fine arts went.

“The art wold is so fragmented and intimating,” said Phillips in an interview with VentureBeat, “We fundamentally believe the art world doesn’t have to be a ‘you have to rich or an insider’ to have access. So we set this up.”

The recently-launched Rise Art, like a number of art-oriented websites, allows artists to upload and sell artwork from dedicated profiles. But while this website helped artists get online, it wasn’t unique — websites such as ImageKind allows you to upload artwork for sale — and wasn’t interactive. That’s where the new social elements come into play. Now visitors to the Rise Art website can follow artists they like and receive notifications based on their activity. The website boasts an activity stream, which allows you to see when an artist uploads a new work, sets up an event, updates their status and more. You’ll also receive notifications from artists you’ve purchased from in the past.

It’s not that easy to sell your art on Rise Art, however. In order to approved for sale, artists go through round of voting from the community, which is then passed on to a panel of “experts” for judgement. These experts include gallery owners and others in-the-know such as well known curator Kenny Schachter.

“They review the portfolios on the site, let us know which ones they really like, and based on their view, we feature the artists,” said Phillips.

According to Phillips, only about 10 percent of artists make it to sale-approval after the voting.

There is mutual benefit for an artist being judged and a volunteer expert, however. Artists often want their works showcased in a gallery, it brings on attention and potential buyers. Gallery owners want to find budding artists they find talented, who may make a good exhibition. In this way, the two parties are able to meet a little less serendipitously. Experts are also welcomed to create profiles on Rise Art and promote gallery events and other news.

Rise Art doesn’t make money through facilitating these relationships, instead it only makes money when the artists do. The company has revenue-sharing agreements and takes a cut of every work sold. Rise Art also commissions some artists to create exclusive works to be sold on the website only.

The company is using its undisclosed seed round to fund new ways of generating revenue, such as an art rental program, which is yet to be launched. The program will allow you to install a piece of artwork for a certain period of time to make sure it fits with your house and personality. Art gets expensive and without the in-person aspect a gallery provides, this service brings the purchase back down to a human level.

Investors in the seed round include StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr and Great Oaks Venture Capital. Rise Art was founded in 2010, is headquartered in London and serves over 30 countries worldwide.

The site plans to facilitate commercial transactions by letting individual buyers and sellers expose their social capital on Facebook and, later, Twitter, Tumblr and other sources. In other words, if you have a lot of friends on Facebook, your friends there effectively vouch for your identity on Copious.

“That will give me a huge amount of comfort that you are who you say you are,” said Copious cofounder and operations chief Jonathan Ehrlich. “That transparency should make the experience a lot more engaging, trustworthy and better for both buyer and seller.”

Copious joins the growing ranks of socially-driven commerce startups. Groupon is the big fish in this pond, with $713.4 million in revenue in 2010 and a $750 million public offering planned for later this year. Other startups, such as Egg Cartel and Yardseller, also attempt to bring a social dimension to commerce. Facebook is likely to be adding payment features, having recently started a subsidiary called Facebook Payments. Meanwhile, eBay has a social dimension — with buyer and seller reputations — but has been struggling for years to make that system work effectively.

To use Copious, you log on using Facebook Connect. The site, which has a Facebook-esque light blue theme, lets you browse buyers or shop for goods. For each item offered for sale, Copious displays a meter — it looks like orange cellphone signal bars made out of person-like icons — that shows the strength of your social connection to the seller. For instance, if you’re friends with someone who is friends with the seller on Facebook, it might show five bars — or only one bar for someone who’s not in your social circle at all.

To facilitate connections, Copious will let sellers offer incentives to buyers, such as $5 off a purchase if you follow them on Twitter or share the product listing with your own followers. That, the founders hope, will help encourage relevant product recommendations — even if you’re not looking for something.

“One of the great things about the early eBay was this idea of serendipitous discovery,” said Ehrlich. “You’d go there to buy a pair of shoes and wind up buying an Elvis toaster.”

Ehrlich wants to help bring back the era of spontaneous Elvis toaster purchases by making it easier to find sellers with the kind of stuff you’ll find charmingly quirky, or quirkily irresistible, and he hopes that social connections are the way to do that.

The site will launch with little more than a selection of handbags for sale. That’s because, Ehrlich said, handbags are something people are passionate about, there’s a lot of variety, and you need to trust that the seller is not trying to sell you something counterfeit. These are all things Copious can help with.

The founders hope sellers will shortly offer a wider variety of products.

The company plans to integrate Twitter and Tumblr social networks soon after launch and is working to incorporate eBay reputations as well.

Serial entrepreneur Jim Rose is the chief executive officer for Copious, and Rob Zuber is the company’s chief technical officer. Copious has eight employees in all and is based in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood.

Foundation Capital led the investment round, with Embarcadero Ventures, the BlackBerry Partners Fund, Google Ventures, and angel investors. The advisory board includes two Facebook employees, Javier Olivan and Alex Schultz.

Photo credit: Dylan Tweney, VentureBeat

Scott Roback, the company’s senior vice president of strategy and business development, said that where companies like Facebook are trying to build a social graph, TreatFeed is trying to create “the commerce graph, or the monetization layer of the social graph.”

Here’s how it works: TreatFeed aggregates deals from across the Web. Users come to the site for the deals, then ask their friends and family to join too. When users find deals they like, they can recommend them to their connections on the site. And if someone actually acts on a deal, then TreatFeed gets an affiliate commission, which it then splits with users. The user who signed up for the deal gets a percentage, and the user who brought them into TreatFeed gets a smaller percentage, and so on, up through four “generations”.

Technically, the commission for shoppers takes the form of points, but those points can be redeemed for prizes or cash. Roback estimated that half of the money TreatFeed receives for each deal will eventually go to users.

This system takes advantage of the fact that shoppers are already recommending products and deals to each other, Roback said. And the fact that TreatFeed is rewarding people for bringing in more users, rather than for recommending specific deals, seems smart, because it will help the site build out its user base quickly. It might also avoid criticisms that this system (like other “multilevel marketing” programs) starts to look like a pyramid scheme.

Even though TreatFeed is building a social graph (er, “commerce graph”) of its own, it also integrates with Facebook, allowing users to find friends from Facebook and post deal recommendations on the social network. And it will work on affiliate programs with publishers, allowing publishers to make money not just on the shoppers who sign up directly from their site, but on the larger SocialTree that builds as those shoppers continue using TreatFeed and bringing in their friends.

TreatFeed was incubated by Lagovent, the firm created by Konstantin Glasmacher and Brett Markinson. Markinson is the new startup’s chief executive. The pair has already successfully launched one e-commerce company, HauteLook, which was acquired by Nordstrom. TreatFeed raised $5.4 million in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners.