OfferUp Eyes Small Businesses, Creates New Engineering Team

While OfferUp started as a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) mobile selling app, it’s looking to grow by adding business sellers. This week, it announced the opening of a new office in Florida that will house an engineering team focused on serving small businesses.

The new team will work on developing APIs and tools to help small businesses reach OfferUp’s millions of users, it explained. OfferUp’s new Director of Engineering Rodrigo Violante will oversee the team.

The move to add a B2C component follows last year’s move to enable sellers to ship items. As we noted at the time, sellers can meet buyers locally and do deals in cash, or they can agree to ship items and accept electronic payment through OfferUp’s integration with Stripe.

OfferUp announcement follows:

Two years ago, we moved from our first office into a much larger space to support the growth of our company. It takes a large, and dedicated team to deliver new features like OfferUp Autos and Nationwide Shipping, and to continue the momentum we’re going to get even larger.

Today, we’re announcing OfferUp is expanding by adding a new engineering team in Miami that will be focused on developing new APIs and tools for small businesses that will help them more easily reach the millions of people that use OfferUp every year.

The new office will be managed by our new Director of Engineering Rodrigo Violante, who reports to our CTO Ameesh Paleja. For ten years, Violante has run remote teams across the world and was most recently the CTO of PriceTravel, where he implemented technical solutions that significantly improved the company’s profitability. Before that, he was CTO of Televisa, where he built a proprietary platform to serve millions of users on Smart TVs, game consoles, phones, and tablets.

Opening an office in Florida is a natural fit, because Miami is also one of our most popular communities. Over 15% of Miamians use OfferUp to buy and sell local favorite items like sunglasses and jewelry.

SOURCE: OfferUp Blog Post

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.