Wendy Tan-White On Moonfruit's Shopbuilder Launch: The Democratisation of Selling

Small businesses can set up shop instantly on web, Facebook, mobile and beyond

 Moonfruit, the UK’s number one DIY website builder, has partnered with PayPal to launch ShopBuilder – an “out-of-the-box” e-commerce solution that lets traders sell instantly and everywhere, through the global channels of the web, mobile and social media. 

ShopBuilder instantly works across several platforms – including the low cost customer acquisition channels of web, mobile and Facebook – and allows small businesses to start taking payments from across the world immediately. Integration to eBay and other marketplaces will be coming soon.

Unlike existing tools for online traders, there is no need to create a different shop for different platforms or devices, and it is not complex, it’s light and simple to set-up. ShopBuilder is also optimised for PayPal: traders can reach their market immediately by simply registering their email address, without having to setup a merchant account.

The Moonfruit and PayPal partnership helps to simplify web tools for micro-traders. As small businesses and retailers account for 51% of the UK’s GDP, Moonfruit and PayPal wanted to give them the tools to make money from the web without investing much time or cost.

“Moonfruit’s new ShopBuilder will make it possible for anyone to design, create and publish a shop online and trade immediately,” explains Moonfruit founder and CEO Wendy Tan-White.“We’re aiming to democratise selling by giving consumer retailers the power to craft and own their online brand identity, to set it free whether on web, mobile or social.”

Cameron McLean, General Manager Merchant Services at PayPal UK, says: “We partnered with Moonfruit because they have already helped hundreds of thousands of small businesses to build their own site quickly and easily with a PayPal integration included. By using PayPal Express Checkout, PayPal’s faster checkout service, customers can now start trading immediately with a solution that works on mobile as well as the web.”

"Moonfruit is going to kill it with this ‘out-of-the-box’ web, mobile and Facebook e-commerce solution,” adds Dave McClure, 500 Startups Founding Partner and Moonfruit investor.

“This is the perfect storm of feature releases, and couldn’t have come at a better time as Facebook are currently focusing on integrating the Open Graph with e-commerce.”

Moonfruit ShopBuilder launched on 19th October.

Click here to read The NextWomen's interview with Wendy Tan-White from March this year, and here to watch a video of Wendy talking about the ups and downs of raising funding.