Why this ecommerce site pivoted and started accepting crypto payments

Photo credit: Stanisic Vladimir / 123RF

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Bitcoin.com where we publish the revised transcripts from their podcasts. This is heavily revised from the show’s original transcript. For the full episode, go here.

Joe Einhorn is the founder of Fancy, a social ecommerce platform that’s like a combination of Pinterest and Amazon. In 2012, they pivoted their business model and started accepting Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin as payments.

Here are some interesting bits from our discussion about his career, ecommerce, and how crypto fits into all of this.

How did you get a job at Capital IQ (now S&P Capital IQ) at the age of 16?

My mom was taking a continuing education course for grownups, and I needed to get a job. So, I got her credentials and went into a job board. There was a job posting for a software engineering role in New York City, and they were looking for college graduates.

I was one of those 16-year-olds who looked like a 12-year-old. But I went up there and met an interesting guy who was trying to start his own investment bank. He wanted to use software to make the bank more efficient than traditional banks. And this was in 1996 or 1997 when all software and web development tools were in their early days.

He asked me, “Do you know how to build computer programs? Have you ever done anything with a database before? Do you know anything about the internet?” I remember saying, “Yeah. I know everything. Check out my website.” I showed him the website where I made a graphic with my name. Then he said, “Oh, forget it. This is it. We’re done.” So, I ended up being the first employee of what would be this fairly big company now.

Tell us about Fancy

I started Fancy about nine and a half years ago. I was looking at Amazon, thinking, “Wow, this is the most incredible monopoly of anything that I’ve ever seen.” But the ramifications of where it was headed if it were the only way retail would be conducted seemed a little bit odd. I thought commerce and retail could be done in different, cool ways.

So when we started, we were like, “We’re going to build a database of everything in the world.” We were going to slice and dice it with different metadata and try to have as much product information and consumer behavior as Amazon out of the gate. So, we approached that as a data collection project.

But social just blasted off and we came to this idea: who cares if you know about every product in the world if you don’t know what it means to people? So, we started Fancy as a social network around cool stuff that you could buy.

Then, I got a lot of global feedback that Fancy was cool, but people wanted to be able to buy the things they see on our platform. So, we put the buy button on, which gave us a great use case. Wherever you are in the world, you could see all the coolest stuff across brands, categories, and price points, and buy them all in one place.

The next step was to move to the marketplace model, and we started focusing on the merchants and brands. We built an ad business, where merchants could not only sell on Fancy and pay us on a success model but also buy ad placements. We also built our own ecommerce platform, like Shopify.

We recently made a switch at Fancy. Since late 2012, we have been accepting crypto payments through Coinbase, initially, and then BitPay.

How would you sum up the crypto era today?

Talking about the profile of those who spend in crypto today, they are mostly above-average, savvy adopters.

Why is this a great time to bring in bitcoin to Fancy?