Online shopping gateways are plenty. There’s NexTag. Like.com is another such site has gotten itself quite a bit of attention and traffic over the past few quarters. Of course, the eminently recognizable Shopping.com is as mainstay as they come. And then there’s Become. What makes Become a name worth mentioning today? The company has raised some $17.5m, courtesy of TPG Growth, to take on larger foes in the coming years. It's aim: the top of the crop.
Become.com is not a new entry in the “comparison shopping” marketplace. It has been around since 2004, in fact. Yet it hasn’t garnered the press that, say, Like.com has managed to nab for itself. Though it presents a clean, collected interface for shoppers, it doesn’t play the role of a numerical benchmarker to any significant degree. (Become offers consumers a catalogue of about 25 million products. Anthony Ha at VentureBeat offers a nicely grounded comparison with TheFind, which itself sports a database of some 170m products, just to offer some perspective on Become’s present statistical position.)
But it’s not a weak member of the shopping service crowd. Over the past 12 months, dating from Feb ’07 to Feb ’08, Become grew an impressive 260%. The company’s co-founder and chief exec, Michael Yang, who helped launched MySimon prior to the burst of Bubble 1.0, considers it a real possibility to expand the site over the next few years to at least #3 in the industry. How so? By having the customer, rather than the product supplier, first in mind.