Yahoo buys social shopping website Polyvore

Financial details of the acquisition of the Silicon Valley-based startup were not disclosed.

Polyvore’s co-founder and CEO Jess Lee was earlier part of Google Inc’s associate manager programme, which Marissa Mayer headed before joining Yahoo as CEO.

In regards to the aforementioned Mavens (mobile, video, native, social) growth strategy, Yahoo noted in Friday’s announcement that Polyvore will power native shopping ads intended to drive traffic and sales back to retailers.

At Polyvore, community members can arrange and display collages of clothing, or arrange coordinated pieces of home decor.

Yahoo said in a statement that the fashion website will be a good fit with Yahoo Style and Yahoo Beauty, and “will strengthen Yahoo’s digital magazines and verticals through the incorporation of community and commerce”.

Yahoo! Inc.is buying shopping-service Polyvore Inc., seeking to improve its online fashion content and boost shopping-related advertising.

The results have been lackluster so far, barely budging Yahoo’s revenue. Founded in 1994 by Stanford PhD candidates David Filo and Jerry Yang as a way for them to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet, Yahoo! has grown into a company that helps p…

Although its last quarterly earnings report was a bit of a mixed bag, Wall Street took notice as Yahoo officially filed to establish the long-awaited spinoff from its multi-billion dollar Alibaba investment. Polyvore had raised $22 million in seed funding, with the most recent round closing in January of 2012.

“On the advertising side, we’ve built a pretty successful business”, Lee said. We should also note that three ex-Yahoo engineers, Jianing Hu, Guangwei Yuan and Pasha Sadri, started Yahoo back in 2007. Polyvore’s site will continue to operate and its staff will join Yahoo offices in Sunnyvale, San Francisco and New York.