Adoptaguy's online "supermarket of love" goes live in the US and soon the UK

Seems like France is kind of full of dating sites. And that’s probably not so surprising given that the country is often considered one of the most romantic. Hopefully everyone has now heard of Meetic, the French online dating giant listed on the Euronext stock exchange since 2005 who scooped-up Match.com’s European division last year. And then there’s a couple newcomers that are making headlines, like SmartDate (who scored €2 million earlier this year so that you can date the friends of your Facebook friends) and AttractiveWorld (the name says it all, you have to be “accepted” to join the online community).

And then there’s Adoptaguy. Let me just preface this with the company’s tagline: “Ladies, find great deals at the supermarket of love.” Yes, it’s cheesy and who knows, that’s probably why it works. Essentially, what sets Adoptaguy apart from a lot of the other sites is that it reverses traditional roles. With a rather humorous e-commerce-like vibe, women go through the site and select the men they like by putting them in their shopping carts – and only those selected few will be able to interact with their “buyers”.

But even if women are going through the motions of “purchasing” men on the site, the service is entirely free for female users. The business model is somewhat inspired by the way men pay to get into night clubs and women often get in for free.

The team came up with the model once they realized that a large portion of women still had issues with dating sites for a number of reasons, one of them being that they may get spammed by uninteresting men. And so now, in an attempt to attract as many ladies as possible, Adoptaguy is free for the females and seeks to put the control in their hands in a rather humorous way.

So how does putting a man in a shopping cart really change things for a woman on a dating site? Beats me. But that being said, there are 3 million people currently using the service, mainly in the 18-30 age-range, with roughly 40% being women. And most of the users of the Paris-based startup are in either France, Belgium or Switzerland. But that’s probably because the site was only in French until recently. The US version of the site is now live and the UK version should launch in the beginning of next year.