Hyperlocal business directory provider MerchantCircle has taken $10 million Series B in a round that included previous investors Rustic Canyon Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Steamboat Ventures (Walt Disney), and new participants IAC and Square 1 Bank.
The funding will allow MerchantCircle to pursue acquisition opportunities and accelerate their strategy of becoming “the most effective channel for connecting local businesses with local consumers”.
Los Altos based MerchantCircle provides small businesses a web page listing, blogging and email newsletter application, and a local business network that focuses on connecting local businesses. The “circle” in the company’s name comes from a viral marketing strategy that encourages members to sign new members in their community.
MerchantCircle has attracted more than 250,000 local merchants since launching in 2006. Entry-level packages are free of charge with enhanced advertising memberships starting at $29 per month.
They must have a decent number of paid subscribers otherwise why would they get the 10 million
Is Merchant Circle that company that cold calls you and tells you that your business has a negative review on its website or is that a different company?
Hehehehee
Its the same company …
these guys are a bit of scammers and they will not win in the long end with such unscrupulous business practice of automatic cold calling. Someone should sued them for misrepresentation.
Hmm… the fact that merchantcircle targets small, local businesses outside of major cities concerns me. They target brick and mortar shops that aren’t necessarily web savvy.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see some company like AOL acquire them.
They will be joining the deadpool ranks very soon. This current investment is a desperate attempt at salvaging their initial investment. Hopefully they can use the money to acquire a company that has some real business value and potential, or they can take the facebook and opensocial approach and open up their platform to developers.
MerchantCircle has several levels of service, including a free membership. Do we know if the 250,000 merchants are all at a paid level? If not, what proportion are paid vs. free?
Great post Duncan. Can’t believe these guys were under my radar. Very intriguing site. It seems they have managed to build real and substantial content, though they don’t rank as well in Google as they say they do.
Basically their business model is, forget about driving traffic to your amateurish home page which has no backlinks anyway, get a listing with us instead. As such they form an alternative to Adwords, and how their site’s pages rank in Google serps should be carefully watched.
Congrats Wayne, Kevin and team . . .
Looking forward to checking out the new and improved Merchant Circle.
Adriana
You have to wonder how much value Merchant Circle has now that Facebook offering many of the same features to businesses with its new “Pages” feature.
You can either live within Facebook’s Social Graph, or hope someone finds you on a search engine.
New money? Great!
Connecting up with other business owners and promoting your regular website, (or using your Merchant Circle profile while you don’t have one yet) – and that’s terrible?
Too bad there aren’t more such terrible sites on the internet providing useful tools and resources for small businesses as free memberships. Is Merchant Circle perfect? Hardly. Does it help small businesses improve their traffic. Apparently so. At least that’s what the members are reporting on the forum. But what would they know? They are only using the facility…
I predict deadpool sooner than later. I just checked out their site and it is a merchants listing with 0 reviews for the service I requested. Why is this useful beyond a yellow page or Yahoo or Google business service? At least with Google, it aggregates reviews from multiple site for a business. This site is completely useless to me.
For a small business with little to no web presence, Merchant Circle can be extremely useful. Their local and business profile pages already rank well in google, providing a free method for quickly getting a business into the SERPs. And then there’s the contextual backlinks.
I launched a website for a new Valet Parking comapny in Naples, Florida one month ago. I purchased a virgin domain name and on the day of the site’s launch, I discovered Merchant Circle and created a free profile. Within 2 days, the merchant page for Gulf Coast Valet ranked #1 on the google serp for “Valet Naples” and #2 for “Naples Valet”. It’s been a month and I still maintain the same rankings, but here is the interesting part. The site http://www.gulfcoastvalet.com quickly rose in the serps on its own in the last few weeks, and google registers external links from merchant circle on my stats. The back links from merchant circle profiel have positively effected gulfcoastvalet.com ’s rankings.
I’ve never paid them a penny and my website has benefited from their service. Not bad.
What happened to their program of offering localized coupon feeds?
THere was also zixxo – I tried creating an account on that site several months ago but got only errors – is zixxo in the deadpool??
I’d love to find a real source of localized discount coupons presented as an rss feed or through a query API or even an ad-inclusion script that localized the ads…
They are doing a great job, the support and tools available there are only getting better with time. I am a member of this community and I have been member since 2006, and I am very happy with their overall support and customer service.
We have been using MerchantCircle to promote discount codes to other small businesses. The integration of ads, coupons, blogs, newsletters has paid off 1000%.