Subscription Commerce Challenges
Startups in the subscription commerce space are often met with the challenge of balancing inventory costs and maintaining margins until they are able to secure wholesale agreements with the respective manufacturers.

Netplenish Demo Video

How is Netplenish Disrupting Subscription Commerce?
Netplenish built a platform where which combines price comparisons with automatic fulfillment of products such as toilet paper, detergent and other essentials. Once consumers have provided a shopping list, the platform determines which participating merchants would be able to fulfill the shopping list based on price and availability of merchandise. The company also enables consumers to throttle the subscriptions so that if some products are not yet needed they can pause that portion of the subscription.

Key Challenges for Netplenish
The company’s patented approach to subscription commerce largely focuses on convenience and price. However, a key component that needs to be addressed in customer support. Issues are bound to arise with product defects and then the situation begs the question as to who is responsible for handling those inquiries? Additionally, not everyone would want to purchase based on the total price of goods within a given subscription. Let’s say that you are accustomed to paying $20 for diapers and your subscription from Netplenish, based on the total price of goods within the subscription, charges you $25 for those diapers because the total cost of diapers and other goods was lowest from Walmart instead of Target? Additionally, consumers may not receive the best pricing as not all merchants will participate through Netplenish.

Netplenish was founded by Mark Evans, Steve Markowitz, and David Lee Compton. On Angel List, Netplenish has attracted some high profile followers and investors. Additionally the company was recently the winner of the pitch event in San Francisco.

Netplenish Patent
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Forrester has predicted that the era of social commerce will heat up over the next five years, and NY-based Altrinsic has made a bet on this trend with their recent acquisition of ShopIt.com

Shopit.com is an e-commerce platform that lets buyers and sellers complete simple transactions on social networking sites. Atrinsic claims that the application has been downloaded 800,000 times, and that they will soon allow sellers to import existing listings from eBay & Yahoo stores to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Social commerce has come a long way over the last couple years. Facebook tried to push the movement forward with their Beacon product, but that ended poorly when users were automatically opted into what seemed like a violation of privacy. But the landscape is different today. The “walls” and “activity streams” of social networks are now a major major distribution channel for content & links, and younger users are connecting more and more to one another rather than to institutions. Social-commerce start ups can benefit in a big way from this. But they’ll also need to mitigate a major risk… With advertising revenues dipping, social networks are clamoring for ways to add transactional revenue to their books. The barriers to entry are quite low.

ShopIt.com is based in Los Angeles and received $2.5M in Series B funding from Emerson Ventures and Propulsion Ventures.

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