Strongbark.com Advances Online Shopping with World's First One-Stop Social Shop

CHICAGO, Sept. 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Strongbark, Inc. released its next-generation shopping site, the world's first private, protected social network dedicated to shopping, saving and privately sharing with trusted friends. Strongbark.com combines a comprehensive offer site with friend engagement tools to easily explore, discover and privately share discounted products and services. The result is an advanced application that enables users to easily follow friends' recommended shopping activities in a quiet, personalized setting while saving them time, money and rewarding them for activity on the site.

With more than 2,500 retailers and well over 75,000 offers available daily, users can search using keywords or categories to quickly and easily find virtually any products or services they want. But now for the first time instead of only 'liking', 'tweeting' or 'pinning' a deal, users can now 'bark™' and privately share what they find with friends who are following them.

"Users can share one to one, or with their entire network," said Les Teichner, Co-Founder and Chairman of Strongbark, Inc. "Friends can also compete with each other for status or just for fun.  But what makes us different is our users only win when their friends follow and value what they're recommending—that's been the joy of designing our site to be about Friends First™."

Unlike other shopping sites, Strongbark.com does not inundate users with commercially cluttered newsfeeds, spammy 'deal-of-the-day' emails, and pushy unwanted product ads following them all over the web. Instead Strongbark created an authentic environment where friends can curate and share offers together naturally, without annoying advertisements or data scrapers who want to track, tag and target everything users are doing online and offline.

"We've improved online shopping by connecting like-minded people, protecting their data, and enabling them to easily see relevant recommendations from their trusted friends and then shop, save and share with others all on one site," said David Beazley, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Strongbark, Inc. "The days of finding something you like on one website, seeking completely random, likely corrupted crowd-sourced comments about the product or service on another site, looking for a discount promotion code that only works a small percentage of the time on yet another, and finally sharing what you found on still a fourth site are over. We do it all beautifully and seamlessly from one application."

But the real power of Strongbark comes from always starting your shopping experience browsing relevant recommendations from people you trust the most. More than anyone else, users know their friends' likes and preferences best. With Strongbark social shopping becomes more customized, more personalized, more useful and more fun every single day.

To make the site more enjoyable, users can follow friends' recommendations right from their home page, along with choices to follow curated category pages, popular offers from their favorite companies and trending hot deals. There is also an internal rewards program called Bones™.  Bones can be traded for digital music, movies, TV shows, ebooks, audiobooks, apps and games in the site's digital marketplace.   

Finally as part of its pledge to users, Strongbark will make social shopping socially conscious, giving back to charities chosen by users.

Strongbark was founded by David Beazley and Les Teichner, who have been quietly developing the patents-pending technology for nearly two years. Both co-founders have distinguished track records.  Beazley, former principal of Synergy Financial, a Chicago-based private capital and consulting firm, has mentored dozens of start-ups and is still recognized from his Northwestern football days and the teams' first Rose Bowl appearance in 47 years. Teichner, no football player, but also a private investor and entrepreneur, started Strategic Processing Corporation and was co-inventor of a seminal e-commerce patent (U.S. Patent No. 4,799,156 entitled "Interactive Market Management System").  Strategic Processing Corporation was acquired by Oracle in 2001.

About Strongbark, Inc. 
Strongbark® helps users keep up with friends and trends with its next-generation social shopping site. Combining trusted referrals and private deal sharing, users quickly and easily find great stuff recommended by reliable friends. The site allows no spam, no advertising and will never sell user data, all to stay true to its pledge to users: All Bark. No Bite™.

Strongbark.com is only phase one of an expansive platform that will  soon include mobile and tools for smaller merchants to also give their fans a private sharing  and shopping option.      

For more information, go to Strongbark.com.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140917/146863

SOURCE Strongbark, Inc.