If you ever wished for a central place to keep track of your online purchases and to store all those email receipts, MyThings might just be what you are looking for. The London-based company just announced a $5 million Series B round. Besides helping you to keep track of your purchases, MyThings also provides access to information about product recalls, manuals, and insurance, as well as an easy way to sell you things on eBay, donate them, or report them stolen. For art collectors, MyThings also provides a valuation service. This new round of financing was led by Dotcorp Asset Management and GP Bullhound Sidecar.
MyThings allows you to either forward emailed receipts from product purchases or add purchased items to your list manually. In our experience, MyThings mostly works as advertised, but at times, it is not able to parse receipts from some retailers, including Newegg, the popular online electronics store.
MyThings raised an $8 million Series A round in 2006 and has been growing steadily ever since, though according to Compete, this growth has stalled somewhat after the company saw its traffic go up considerably during the 2007 holiday season.
MyThings' strongest assets might be its relationships with a number of large online vendors, including Casio UK, Currys, Dell Canada, Tesco, TigerDirect, and Woolworths. Those retailers upload purchase information directly to MyThings and consumers can then access information about the product through MyThings' web site.
The service already has 1 million active users (though it is not clear how 'active' is defined here). MyThings is also very popular in the art market, where a large number of sellers and buyers use MyThings' 'Trace' due diligence service.
The company did not release any information about how it was going to use this new round of financing specifically. Chances are, however, that it will step up its marketing efforts during the upcoming holiday season. Hopefully, the company will also dedicate some of these resources to improving its back-end technology for parsing receipts.
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Thanks for the introduction of this service. Their site seems very balanced, and well thought out. I guess it will be smart to put some cash into marketing and gain some additional traffic and eventually subscribers.
John aka OrganizingLA
Posted by: John Trosko | October 14, 2008 12:03 AM
First on the to-buy list, a web server! Site's down :)
Posted by: Marcus | October 14, 2008 9:12 AM
I've had an account on MyThings for a long time now. Unfortunately, I've found it to be too hard to add items to the "portfolio." Way too many steps involved just to get the basics set up.
I had to add the item. Then go into the Portfolio, open the item, press the "edit" button, then enter the info I wanted (price, store, date, etc.)
It's a great concept, and probably easier for online shopping if you use their toolbar. But, to go through and add all the (relative) expensive things I have and want to keep track of, it's quite a pain.
Has anyone been using this regularly and like it? I've gone back to keeping my receipts in a filing system of PDFs.
Posted by: John | October 14, 2008 7:09 PM
This is a similar concept, but for houses.
Posted by: Rob | October 20, 2008 2:45 AM