ShopLocket – an innovative company that is changing the face of e-commerce, has completed a $1 million seed round that includes investment from Rho Canada Ventures and Peter Thiel. ShopLocket recently joined the WordPress.com VIP Featured Partner Program that allows simple integration with the MagazineLiteracy.org website, which is powered by WordPress VIP.
The seed for ShopLocket was planted when co-founder, Katherine Hague, found how difficult it was to sell a single product online while trying to sell t-shirts for her consulting company, Ninja Parade. This seed grew into ShopLocket, which is now a powerful tool for entrepreneurs throughout the world. ShopLocket makes selling products online as easy as embedding a link.
Technology is at the core of the Magazine Literacy Marketplace—it provides an arena for crowdfunding the delivery of magazines to meet the needs of literacy programs here in the U.S. and all around the world. Magazines are enormously powerful literacy resources. This new partnership with ShopLocket jump-starts the magazine exchange and moves MagazineLiteracy.org towards meeting the world’s literacy needs. Literacy programs, publishers, and consumers and businesses will be brought together on this ingenious, elegant platform, thanks to the ShopLocket web service.
Dan Kalmar, Community Manager at ShopLocket, expressed the team’s enthusiasm for the new partnership:
“We’re really looking forward to powering the vision that MagazineLiteracy.org has. Literacy is something that we take for granted living in a developed country, but illiteracy still affects many more people than it should. What MagazineLiteracy.org is doing seems like such a simple concept, but those are often the causes that yield the biggest results,” he said.
The vision behind this partnership is to create a crowdfunded e-commerce engine to support literacy programs and to get magazines into the hands, homes, and hearts of at-risk children and families. MagazineLiteracy.org founder John Mennell,, states that “this creates an opportunity to fulfill our long-held dream of sharing our love for magazines via an online marketplace.”
“We are very excited about this partnership for launching our dream of the world’s first and only Magazine Literacy Marketplace. Essentially, we are operating a literacy store with two products: packages of literacy needs for consumer sponsorship, and bundles of new and recycled magazines to meet them. Our vision is to operate a crowdfunded e-commerce platform that brings everything together in a single, global online marketplace to conduct literacy transactions. With ShopLocket’s cutting edge e-commerce technology under the hood, magazines can be ordered and sent from anywhere, to anywhere. In essence, literacy needs are on display for literacy champions—anywhere and everywhere—to browse and to procure.”
MagazineLiteracy.org is on its way to tackling literacy needs around the world. As a non-profit organization, the program depends on numerous and generous literacy champions and volunteers who are providing the opportunity for children and adults to develop a love for reading, powered by wonderful magazines.