The Carted API connects the fragmented players across the e-commerce ecosystem. This enables platforms, creators, influencers, and developers, who previously would need to integrate with brands and retailers one by one, to sell products directly on their own platform, retain customers and traffic, monetise their audience, and build new e-commerce experiences.

In the spirit of The Art of the Demo, the Carted team have this skill in spades. Carted's demo examples are here and here.

Founders that hustle

Holly Cardew and Mike Angell are the team to solve this problem. They are multi-time company builders and accomplished operators with deep domain expertise in the e-commerce space, complementary skill sets, and relentless hustle. Holly has built four Shopify apps and founded Pixc, helping merchants organise their product catalogs, whilst Mike has experience at Culture Kings, Shopify, and Fast, and is a self-taught developer who founded his first e-commerce business all the way back in 2004. Their unique insight and clarity of vision for Carted is borne from their shared frustration of the experience uncovered when they set out to build Vop, where they created a shoppable Tik Tok feed, and realised no single checkout experience could integrate products from multiple vendors.

A compelling business model

Carted's business model is compelling as it simultaneously drives value for stakeholders across the e-commerce value chain:

• Platforms can earn revenue for their content, own their customers, and build new e-commerce experiences.
• Customers benefit from superior commerce experiences created through contextual commerce, including ease of use and a shorter path to conversion
• Merchants/brands benefit through increased revenue opportunities, gaining new customers and increasing product visibility across a range of platforms.

By providing the infrastructure, Carted has the potential to clip the ticket on e-commerce sales and take a slice of a very large pie, with significant volumes. Revenue opportunities for the API include interchange fees, affiliate commissions, promotional codes and product markups, FX conversion, and API calls.

The seed phase

Carted sits firmly within its Seed phase - and will be turning its focus to building out its product, hiring a stellar team, and beginning to connect a vast product index to a variety of integrations to form their infrastructure. They will be striving to build out the core API and demonstrate value across a few platforms - earning the right to connect parties across e-commerce and then building out a compelling product roadmap.

Our experience and thinking on the future of commerce is how we gained conviction at Tidal to back Carted. We are incredibly excited to partner with Holly and Mike on the journey ahead. Stay tuned for updates on their website (they're hiring), Twitter, and LinkedIn.

A note on the future of commerce thematic

There are a number of components in the broader e-commerce value chain. In this context, we observe the transactional aspect of the e-commerce experience evolving across a spectrum:

• Firstly, a centralised model of aggregation and scale, embodied by Amazon
• Then, a decentralised model of platforms & services for vendors, embodied by Shopify
• Next, a universal commerce model blurs the lines of what a traditional store, merchant, affiliate and more is, and therefore opens up entirely new experiences that are defined by a creative ecosystem.

Carted is building this new and exciting infrastructure for the future of commerce. If you're a visionary founder who is ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.

Thanks to Max Kausman for help drafting this post.