www.alvenda.com/ companies/397109 (612) 746 3092

[Now known as 8thBridge] Mer­chants part­ner with Alvenda to cre­ate a social com­merce chan­nel on Face­book and thou­sands of other web­sites. Cus­tomers engage mer­chants on their own terms in a shop­ping expe­ri­ence that is portable, per­son­al­ized, and participatory. His­tory was made on July 8th, 2009 when Alvenda brought online retail to Face­book and again on August 12, 2010 with the travel indus­try. Alvenda mon­e­tizes social media for some of the largest mer­chants in the world includ­ing 1-800-Flowers.com, Brooks Broth­ers, Delta Air Lines, Hall­mark, and the fastest grow­ing divi­sion of Avon called Mark. Over 500 mil­lion peo­ple use Face­book to dis­cover and pro­mote the things they care about. Today, fewer cus­tomers believe in what they are told and buy what they are sold. Increas­ingly, cus­tomers are learn­ing about new prod­ucts from friends more fre­quently than from brands. Alvenda enables cus­tomers to con­nect in a rel­e­vant way with mer­chants on Face­book and empower them to extend sup­port beyond a sim­ple vote of their pock­et­books. Alvenda makes it easy for cus­tomers to more-effectively advo­cate for mer­chants they care about on Face­book, blogs, and other social media. Alvenda’s mer­chants are rewarded with 10 to 20 times the engage­ment rates achieved with tra­di­tional direct mar­ket­ing and social media pro­grams. Peo­ple shop more when not required to leave their pre­ferred online expe­ri­ence and when their friends make a recommendation. Alvenda’s inno­v­a­tive tech­nol­ogy plat­form, Alvenda Store­Cast™, enables the con­ver­gence of social net­work­ing, ecom­merce, and adver­tis­ing. Alvenda opens mil­lions of in-stream shop­ping expe­ri­ences that include a quick check­out fea­ture inside Facebook’s news feed, fan pages, and inside ban­ner ads on pub­lisher web­sites. The store is brought to the cus­tomer rather than the other way around. Alvenda, a Min­neapo­lis MN com­pany, was founded in 2008 as is led by exec­u­tives with domain exper­tise in ecom­merce, direct mar­ket­ing, social media, and online pub­lish­ing. Alvenda was named the grand prize win­ner of the 2009 Min­nesota Cup and has been fea­tured in Adver­tis­ing Age, Finan­cial Times, Wall Street Jour­nal, Busi­ness Week, New York Times, WWD, Bloomberg TV, and Techcrunch. Alvenda is funded by Split Rock Ven­ture Partners.