Teardown | Cart.com

Founded in 2020, Cart.com has raised close to $500M to acquire and develop a suite of eCommerce enablement solutions

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Mar 24, 2022

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Snapshot

Founded in 2020, Cart.com has raised just under $500M in equity & debt in under 2 years.
The company is focused on developing a suite of software solutions & services to enable eCommerce merchants to scale across channels.
Cart.com has quickly scaled up through key partnerships and acquisitions. The company has acquired over 10 companies to date including prominent software solutions for merchants to build storefronts, sell across marketplaces, manage customer engagement, and run fulfillment.

Overview & Products

Cart.com provides merchants with a number of features to grow and operate their eCommerce business under one roof. These functions include tools such as multi-channel management, storefront building, fulfillment, marketing, payments, and customer service software. The website provides details of what its platform offers:

Multi-Channel Management: allows merchants to sell across Amazon, Walmart, and eBay from one platform. The product offers advanced analytics and enables merchants to optimize sales across channels
Storefront: allows building a storefront, complete with analytics, web design and development
Fulfillment: enables order management, fulfillment analytics, packing and shipping services, and inventory storage and management
Advanced Analytics: offers unified analytics and data science solutions
Growth Marketing: enables marketing analytics, strategizing and planning, digital and offline marketing, and performance optimization
Customer Engagement: allows omnichannel customer support, inbound and outbound telesales, and strategizing
Funding: offers clients growth capital and working capital

Business Model & Pricing

Cart.com generates revenue in several different ways depending on the needs of its merchants. Merchants are able to sign up and leverage the entire platform or pick which features they need à la carte.

Services are priced differently depending on the offering. For example, the online storefront charges a base subscription fee and then takes a % of the sales. Meanwhile, shipping services are charged on a per-order basis.

Exact pricing across the suite is not provided on the parent company’s website but can sometimes be viewed by going to the pricing pages for its various acquisitions, as with its Americommerce product. Price points are in line with competitive offerings in the industry.

Traction

In just under 2 years, Cart.com has been able to scale quickly through its acquisition-based strategy. In June 2021, the CEO shared that the company was expecting to hit a revenue run rate of over $80M by the end of the year. According to its website, the company currently has 3000+ brand customers and 850+ team members as of Q1 ‘22.

According to a company press release, Cart.com had processed more than $3B in GMV and had opened 9 fulfillment centers in the year leading up to Feb 2022. Revenue was reported to have increased by more than 400% in that time.

Cart.com had made 10 acquisitions as of Feb 2022. Additional information on the traction of its subsidiary companies is shared below in the History and Evolution section.

Founder(s) & Team

Omair Tariq: Co-founder and CEO. Omair held numerous roles at Blinds.com (a Home-Depot owned company) over a decade at the company including serving as its CFO and COO.

Jim Jacobson: Co-founder and Executive Chairman. Jim is the Founder & CEO of Bearing Ventures, a family office, and investment management company. He serves as a Co-Founder and board member to numerous eCommerce ventures including Cart.com, Venture Brands (venture studio focused on eCommerce), EcommerceBrands.com (a brand aggregator), and more.

History & Evolution

Cart.com was founded in 2020 with a mission to create a platform that makes the process easier for online brands to scale. The company was founded on the principles of closing gaps in the eCommerce space and building economies of scale for its partner merchants. In its short operating history, Cart.com has achieved tremendous growth, with acquisitions being a central part of its growth strategy.

Key Acquisitions and partnerships that Cart.com has engaged in include:

Jan ‘21: Acquired storefront software provider AmeriCommerce. This became the foundation of Cart.com’s eCommerce-as-a-service offering.
Sept ‘21: Partnered with Clearco, enabling its partner merchants to access Clearco’s capital financing to grow their business. Partner merchants can access funds of up to $10M within 24 hours, without having to give up equity of their company.
Nov ‘21: Acquired 180Commerce, a tech-enabled agency for digital brands. Areas of expertise for 180Commerce include advertising strategy, content creation and optimization, customer service and reviews management, analytics, and inventory planning.
Jan ‘22: The company acquired FB Flurry, a national fulfillment provider that at the time was distributing over 35M products annually. With this acquisition, Cart.com merchants can offer next-day delivery across the majority of the U.S.
Jan ‘22: A week after acquiring FB Flurry, Cart.com acquired SellerActive, a company that provides SaaS multichannel eCommerce tools to over 800 leading brands with over 50 million listings across platforms. SellerActive was reported to be managing over $1.9B in GMV.
March ‘22: Cart.com acquired DataFeedWatch, a software solution enabling merchants to keep their data feeds and product catalogs updated across channels. The solution also enables merchants to automatically create ads for products across their catalogs.

Market Snapshot

In 2020 alone, it is estimated that online sales witnessed a growth of 27.6% and crossed $4T as the coronavirus pandemic pushed customers to shop online.
In the current eCommerce landscape, anyone trying to grow an online business faces several constraints. One of the greatest challenges is the fragmented options available for scaling and growing a business. More importantly, the current marketplaces may place focus on keeping end-customers happy, but it is often and mostly at the expense of business owners.
Cart.com originally described its operations as a mix of those on Amazon and Shopify. Amazon boasted over 6 million merchants in 2021 accounting for almost $250B in sales by third-party merchants. Shopify meanwhile boasts over 1 million merchants and over $175B in GMV.
The average Shopify merchant with $5-10M in sales was cited to be using 27 plugins.

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