Its new app released Friday runs in the background to monitor consumers’ location and then surfaces valid and place-appropriate coupons and deals when it knows that they’re shopping. The app learns from users’ Facebook preference and, over time, their in-app behavior to personalize the offers they receive.

In the version rolling out today, the app will only serve up coupons once it senses that users are at one of 1,000 malls across the country (in every state). But the founders said though they started with malls because of the density of shoppers and retailers, their next targets will be big retailers like Target, Kohl’s and Macy’s and by early next year they anticipate a big increase in locations.

“It’s such a hassle to research coupons, especially when you’re in a store but we’re basically missing out on a ton of savings,” said co-founder Navneet Loiwal. “[With Shopular], there’s no need to remember to open an app… a fresh valid coupon shows up on the phone and you can just show the screen to the cashier.”

Other couponing apps out there similarly try to surface relevant in-store deals through the phone – Shopkick, for example, uses proprietary technology that involves in-store sensors to reward customers when they walk into stores, but it requires that they open the app first. And Placecast’s ShopAlerts program uses geofencing technology to send push notifications regarding deals to consumers when they’re near a specific location.

Shopular’s advantage, Loiwal said, is that it not only surfaces deals without consumer action, it runs in the background to monitor consumers’ locations (via GPS, WiFi and cellular sensors) and learn from their movements and shopping behavior to personalize offers.

Historically, one big drawback of location-aware apps that continuously run in the background – like social discovery apps Highlight and Glancee, for example – is the battery drain.  But Loiwal emphasized that he and his cofounder Tommy Tsai have used their technical chops to make the technology efficient and minimize the battery issue.  For example, to conserve power, it figures out the times of day you’re less likely to be shopping and monitors your location less closely then. Loiwal co-founded Google Finance and is a former Shopkick engineer and Tsai was the first engineer at Shopkick and previously worked at early location-based app Loopt (which sold to Green Dot, a provider of retailer pre-paid cards, in March). The pair graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 class, although during the accelerator program they were building different technology that involved push notifications but not for shopping.

The app launched in beta on iOS and Android three weeks ago, and has been downloaded about 250,000 times. But Loiwal said none of the reviews on either platform mention battery problems.

Shopular sources deals from Facebook pages, websites and emails and then has a team manually verify details to make sure consumers never receive expired offers. It says it provides coupons from more than 100 national brands and retailers, like the Gap, Aeropostale, Bath and Body Works, Target and Home Depot.

In the future, it could give retailers a platform for offering more targeted deals to consumers – for example, it could reward its most loyal customers with extra savings or use steeper discounts to lure away a rival’s customers.

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“This notion of content being here and commerce being there doesn’t really exist any more. Everyone has become a publisher,” Lerer Ventures partner and former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau said Tuesday at Group Commerce’s Think Commerce conference in New York.

But, as content and commerce merge, he added that “it’s a lot easier for commerce brands to become publishers… than it is for people on the media side to add commerce.”

Historically, publishers have respected the line between “church and state,” separating editorial content from advertising and commercial content. Even Condé Nast’s Lucky fashion magazine, which is perfectly positioned for commerce, has not made the transition, he said. (Although the recently-launched iPad app does include direct links to products.)

And, it’s easy to understand why that bridge is difficult to cross. In addition to the cultural resistance against compromising an editorial identity with a commercial interest, e-commerce involves creating a whole new business model, with potentially new margin structures, customer service needs and other requirements.

How much credibility can commerce companies earn?

Interestingly, however, Philippe von Borries, co-founder of fashion and beauty site Refinery29 recently told Pandodaily that he thinks it’s commerce companies who have more challenges crossing over into publishing. “No one gives a shit about content from a commerce company,” he said, explaining that his is a media company that uses content to drive its commerce business.  While media companies come from a place of credibility, he believes that any content from commerce companies will only be viewed as a kind of sophisticated marketing.

But while it’s true that a customer may never look to Warby Parker or Gilt Groupe for a position on, say, the fiscal cliff, it doesn’t mean that commerce companies can’t be credible purveyors of content within the verticals on which they focus.  And, as Hippeau said, as social platforms turn everyone into some kind of publisher, the definition of “content” itself is changing, in turn altering what it means to be in the media business.

Thrillist: we’ve turned readers into buyers and vice versa

One company leading the way in the new world of content-meets-commerce is Thrillist and, at the Think Commerce conference, Ben Lerer, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said that more than half of Thrillist’s nearly $70 million annual revenue comes from Jack Threads, the e-commerce site it purchased in 2010.

“We’ve proven that we can turn a reader into a buyer,” he said. “We’re pleased that we can also turn a buyer into a reader.”

But despite Thrillist’s own success, he acknowledged not all media companies are as well positioned to cross into commerce.  From its launch, Thrillist’s value proposition was a site that recommended ways in which young men should spend their time – an ideal starting point for a commercial relationship. But news and sports publishers, even those with engaged audiences, may have a more difficult time with commerce because their content isn’t recommendation or action oriented.

Shana Fisher, managing partner at High Line Venture Partners, said that while it can be tricky to focus on two revenue streams at once and that companies initially supported by advertising revenue (like nearly all media companies) may find it difficult to later ask customers for credit card information, more companies should blend revenue strategies based on content and commerce.

“In verticals that are transactional, the divide is really small,” she said, highlighting food and fashion. “If it’s not related to something that’s transactional, it’s more abstract.”

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Fab, which has 9 million members and its own set of Holiday Shops launched earlier this month, already has strong traction and reach. But the new distribution deal – which the company said is just the second after it’s deal with Facebook – will allow it to access even more shoppers.

“It’s an opportunity for us to get the Fab brand and products out in front of another large user base,” CEO Jason Goldberg told the Wall Street Journal. “Whether it’s LivingSocial or Facebook, it’s less about selling a specific product and more about how do we get introduced to customers we might not be reaching otherwise.”

Though the deal helps Fab reach a broad audience, it was apparently LivingSocial who initiated the conversation, the Journal reported. LivingSocial might have more members, but Fab has a strong following among design-lovers, which could help build LivingSocial’s brand.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but the Journal reported that it will be profitable for Fab, which earns revenue from the product sales, while LivingSocial receives a marketing fee for distribution.

Fab has already had something of a banner year. At the start of the year, it had just 1.5 million members but has been growing steadily. It raised a massive $105 million round of funding in July (and added another $15 million earlier this month) and reaches customers in 26 countries.

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Facebook users can also send subscriptions to digital services like Pandora, Rdio, Hulu Plus and make charitable donations to non-profits. And they’ll be able to send wine from Robert Mondavi Winery and Chandon in the coming weeks.

Facebook launched Gifts in September with 100 retail partners including Starbucks to a small subset of users, building off its acquisition earlier in the year of gifting service Karma. The service is now available to about 20 percent of Facebook users in the U.S. and will gradually roll out to all users.

The Gift feature allows users to buy real-world gifts for their friends. Facebook prompts users to consider buying a gift when their friend’s birthday or a big event comes up. Earlier this month, Facebook allowed mobile users to send gifts. 

The new partners should make Gifts even more attractive. Right now, when you try to pick out a gift, Facebook recommends a bunch of stuff  and also gives you categories like food & drink, babies & kids and home & kitchen to choose from. But a lot of the gifts are products from smaller makers and brands. Getting some bigger brands and more familiar products in the mix might make it easier to get people to pull the trigger on a gift.

For the retail partners, the integration with Gifts gives them a chance to market themselves and pick up new customers. Fab CEO Jason Goldberg told me he’s not interested in the revenue from the partnership. He said he’s looking forward to the ability to spread awareness of Fab. The company plans on giving recipients a $5 gift card to buy their own Fab products.

Gifts represents a big commerce opportunity for Facebook. Since it knows a lot about what’s happening within your social network, it can push users to make targeted purchases throughout the year. Also, getting people to buy even one product allows Facebook to get a credit card on file, which could turn out to be important if Facebook builds out its own payment system.

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The new investment brings Braintree’s total funding to more than $70 million and helps it expand its staff of 100 employees as it push into more overseas markets. The company in August launched in Canada and Europe and now serves 31 countries, with more markets set to open up later this year. It is processing more than $5 billion in payments a year — $1 billion of that in mobile commerce — for more than 3,000 mobile and online merchants.

The company has billed itself as a one-stop shop for startups and merchants that want one payment platform they can rely on as they grow. And it’s hoping to be a go-to resource for overseas merchants who don’t have many options to enable payments and online commerce. Braintree competes against PayPal and Stripe for developers getting started with payments but it also goes up against Authorize.net, Cybersource and others for larger customers.

Braintree supports 130 currencies and recently added instant approval for merchants. And with Braintree’s acquisition of mobile payment startup Venmo in August, Braintree is stepping into the consumer business.

Bill Ready, Braintree’s CEO said he wants to create the infrastructure for commerce that developers and merchants can build on top of.

“What Braintree has done to enable single-click check-out, international payments and making it available for every startup and developer, we were the first to do it in US and we think the whole world should have access to it,” Ready said.

Image courtesy of Flickr user foforix

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On the heels of that growth, the online men’s retailer is announcing that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding.  The round was led by Lightbank, the venture fund founded by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, and included participation from BDMI, Rho Ventures Canada and Real Ventures.

With the new funding, CEO Ethan Song said the company plans to grow its business development, product and merchandizing teams as well as expand into new product categories.

While many compare it to Bonobos and Trunk Club – both of which also seek to simplify the men’s shopping experience – Song said Frank & Oak really wants to take on the Banana Republics, Gaps and J.Crews of the world.

Similar to online eyewear retailer Warby Parker and t-shirt and accessory maker Everlane, it designs and manufacturers all of its own items. As my colleague Eliza Kern has written about, digital fashion brands take a catalog style approach to retail but leverage new technology (as well as prepaid shipping labels for returns) to appeal to a new consumer.

“Our whole mission is to make shopping really easy for men – and to make it highly accessible for most men,” Song said.

The company, which charges nothing to users who sign up, rolls out a new collection every month and doesn’t price any item over $50. It personalizes through user feedback, preferences and buying patterns.

Members also have the option to join its “Hunt Club,” which enables them to receive a few items every month to try on before paying, as well as free shipping and other perks. The initial cost is free but once a member makes a purchase through the program, they are charged the cost of a shirt (which is credited to their account) during the months that they don’t make a purchase.

Consumers are increasingly becoming comfortable with purchasing apparel online, trying it on at home and then returning what they don’t like. So targeting men with reasonably-priced, Banana Republic-type option makes sense. But even mostly online retailers like Warby Parker and Bonobos have opened offline stores and it will be interesting to see if Frank & Oak follows suit.

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The new home page helps boost browsing and discovery on eBay and helps the online marketplace stay ahead of Pinterest, which is becoming a favorite place for finding new products. And since it’s built on top of eBay, everything can be purchased from the news feed. Users can edit their interests for the news feed and look for particular products, which will be reflected in their home page.

The news feed will also consider what a person has searched for, browsed and purchased in the past. And in the future, it may also incorporate more local products that can be purchased nearby. And users can start with general profiles like sports fan to get a taste of different looks.

The news feed is a “reflection of your interests, your passions,” said Mark Carges, eBay’s CTO. “Only we have the depth of consumers insights to enable personlized feeds like this and only we have the breadth of selections, the world’s inventory, to satisfy everyone’s tastes in real time.”

The redesign coincides with eBay’s new logo and is meant to highlight how the company is evolving to stay on top of shopping trends, which are turning toward a convergence of mobile, online and offline shopping. And it shows how eBay is utilizing its vast stores of data to create a more personalized experience for consumers.

The product pages now feature bigger product images, less clutter and more information up top. Users can easily link their PayPal account to their eBay account to enable one-click purchases, instead of the four-step check-out process in place now. EBay’s search experience has also been updated to provide better relevancy and more rankings and more consistent navigation from page to page.

EBay, which now has 350 million product listing, said it is also expanding launching eBay Now, its same-day local delivery service, to New York after it first launched in San Francisco and will expand to more cities soon.

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The New York-based startup, which lets people curate and purchase items through its site – and even compensates users for their actions – is now giving users the option to organize group gifting on its platform.

The new feature, which the company said has been a popular request, enables users to organize a gift, invite others to contribute and have the gift sent directly to the recipient. If the gift invitation doesn’t receive enough contributions within seven days, it expires and the company refunds all of the money.

eBay, which acquired group gifting startup the Gifts Project a year ago, also gives users the option to chip-in on a joint gift. Swedish social gifts startup Wrapp offers a similar feature. The startup FriendFund provides a platform explicitly for group gifting.

For Fancy — which is steadily building a business but trails Pinterest in numbers — the group gifting option gives non-members a new reason to join the site.

The startup also announced a partnership with American Express, which enables members who sync their cards with Twitter to receive $20 back on their next purchase of $100 or more if they tweet #AmexTheFancyOffer. The deal doesn’t extend to all items and only lasts through the end of the September, but Fancy said it’s the beginning of an extended relationship with American Express.

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The truth is, the valuation is actually in the hundreds of millions, not quite half a billion dollars, according to people I’ve talked to. But it’s still a big number for a company that has been working largely in stealth mode and has yet to release any firm customer metrics. And it’s going against big names like PayPal, Visa and Braintree, which is already a favorite of many developers. So is Stripe worthy of the acclaim?

The short answer is: it may not be worth $500 million now but it probably won’t be long before it is.

The company, which has raised $40 million to date, is gaining great word of mouth in the startup community for its payment system. Stripe has created a very simple, next-generation platform for developers, who can deploy payments as if they were hooking up to Amazon Web Services or telephony provider Twilio. Stripe’s developer-friendly product has won over thousands of developers and emerging entrepreneurs, who are able to start taking payments in minutes. The company counts Foursquare, Shopify, 10gen, Fast Company and many others among its customers.

Stripe users don’t have to worry about storing cards, PCI compliance, supporting different card types or dealing with banks. They just work with Stripe’s API and they’re up and running.

“Amazon Web Services was interesting not just because it had better infrastructure necessarily. But by making it so easy and so flexible to build services, different things get built,” said Patrick Collison, who co-founded Striple along with his brother John. “We hear from users that because everyone on their team can use Stripe and because we handle so much stuff for them, we make it easy to launch things and experiment and they end up with different and better products.”

Early investor Ron Conway said at a technology conference in May that Stripe was one of his favorite startups, high praise from a man backing hundreds of companies. “Stripe allows any developers on the Internet, almost through a point and click interface, to enable credit cards on their website,” he said at the time. “It allows people to monetize immediately.”

He’s just one of many big name backers who are staking money on Stripe. General Catalyst led Stripe’s latest round with follow-ons from existing investors Sequoia and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Redpoint Ventures, Chris Dixon and Box CEO Aaron Levie have also joined as new investors. PayPal co-founders Max Levchin and Elon Musk were also early investors.

Stripe is going up against some established players but the startup doesn’t necessarily see itself in competition with PayPal or Braintree. Collison said Stripe has been steadily winning business from new startups and businesses and doesn’t need to steal customers to be a success. That’s because the nature of online commerce is shifting rapidly and opening up new opportunities in the U.S. and abroad.

Now, thanks to platforms like Shopify and Etsy, there are thousands of creators that are launching their own online stores. Mobile is expanding the ability for online commerce to happen anywhere, at any time. And the rise of peer-to-peer start-ups like Uber and Airbnb are also opening up new business opportunities that didn’t exist ten years ago.

One of the biggest hurdles to realizing Stripe’s vision is the fact that it’s limited to the U.S. at present. The company has heard a chorus of requests from developers around the world who are waiting for their country to get Stripe support. Stripe last week launched a beta program in Canada, but there’s no time table for bringing the service to other countries. Collison said Europe is likely the next target after Canada.

Stripe could still hit a rough patch if the startup ecosystem collapses and the bubble bursts. But Stripe isn’t just focused on serving Silicon Valley, said Collison. He believes there’s a huge opportunity in facilitating transactions around the world.

“The overall market is growing so quickly we’d be totally fine if just only new businesses got started on Stripe,” Collison said.

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Rob Kramer, the company’s co-founder and CEO, put it this way: “If Craigslist and Pinterest had a baby – that’s HipSwap.”

Since the site’s launch in March, he said, it’s expanded to cities nationwide, amassed more than $21 million worth of merchandise and attracts about one million monthly unique visitors. He declined to provide user numbers but said the user population is in the six figures and grows 2 to 3 percent a day. The site has also raised about $1.1 million in seed funding from Greycroft Partners, Founders Fund and others.

After bad experiences on eBay and Craigslist, Kramer said he and his co-founder Andrew Skinner created the site to give people an easy, enjoyable way to sell goods online. Items can be new or old, from people’s homes or local vintage and secondhand shops, but he said the goal is a marketplace for “unique inventory at the neighborhood level.” It gives the hipster in Brooklyn a way to buy things from people her area, as well as Chicago, Los Angeles and neighborhoods across the country.

HipSwap overlaps with Etsy in that both marketplaces allow people to sell vintage goods, but Kramer said some Etsy sellers are finding they can sell certain things on HipSwap that they can’t sell on Etsy because HipSwap doesn’t focus on handmade items.

“We want to own the virtual supply chain for the secondary market of goods,” he said.

Sellers can take pictures of their stuff with HipSwap’s iPhone or Android app and then upload them to the website, where they can price, title and post their listings in their own online shop for free. Buyers can receive the items via meetups, shipping or delivery (but only if they live in Los Angeles in New York).

The site released several new features today, including:

• Gilt Groupe-like flash sales that last for 72 hours and offer products in a dedicated category, such as art or fashion.

• The ability to personalize user experiences by giving them the option to “Hip or Skip” items. It’s like Pandora’s thumbs up or down feature and lets the site create a customized marketplace that reflects their preferences.

• The option to tweet their collections, poll Facebook friends for opinions or pin collections on Pinterest.

• An easy way to donate to charity. Every Saturday, HipSwap says it will pick up unwanted goods from users and deliver them to Goodwill for free.

• A quick way to cross-post on Craigslist. With one click, HipSwap sellers can post their items on Craigslist to share their more visual listings (and give HipSwap a bit of promotion).

As someone who loves to find great stuff locally and secondhand (I confess that I’ve even restored a coffee table found on my street), I appreciate the HipSwap idea. And I’m all for a Craigstlist-like marketplace that’s more visual and easier to use. But it will be interesting to see what happens to the site as it grows. Craigslist and eBay struggled to preserve their cultures when they got bigger. As Etsy scales, that’s an issue it’s grappling with as well.

I also wonder about what happens to the quality of goods as more people join. HipSwap bills itself as a way to discover “what’s inside the most fabulous closets, homes and shops in your neighborhood.” But that means a lot of secondhand items, not all of which may look as good in real life as they do online. The social, curation and personalization tools give sellers incentives to present goods that will help them build an audience on the site. And Kramer said sellers need to post the condition of the items. But, for buyers, it’s still hard to gauge the true condition of something from a picture and written report. To prevent the sale of fake goods, Kramer said they’ll be adding a verification process for brand-name items in the next couple of months.

The site doesn’t just want to be known for ease of use or beautiful design, he said, “One of our main goals is to be the most credible marketplace.”

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