mobile commerce
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Tapcart, a ‘Shopify for mobile apps,’ raises a $50 million Series B
Shopify changed the e-commerce landscape by making it easier for merchants to set up their websites both quickly and affordably. A startup called Tapcart is now doing the same for mobile commerce.
The company, which has referred to itself as the “Shopify for mobile apps,” today powers the shopping apps for top brands, including Fashion Nova, Pier One Imports, The Hundreds, Patta, Culture Kings, and thousands more. Following a year of 3x revenue growth, in part driven by the pandemic, Tapcart is today announcing the close of a $50 million round of Series B funding, led by Left Lane Capital. Having clearly taken notice of Tapcart’s traction with its own merchant base, Shopify is among the round’s participants.
Other investors in the round include SignalFire, Greycroft, Act One Ventures and Amplify LA.
Tapcart’s co-founders, Sina Mobasser and Eric Netsch, have worked in the mobile app industry for years. Mobasser’s previous company, TestMax, offered one of the first test prep courses on iOS, while Netsch had more recently worked on the agency side to create mobile and digital experiences for brands. Together, the two realized the potential in helping online merchants bring their businesses to mobile, as easily as they were able to go online with Shopify.
Tapcart’s founders Sina Mobasser and Eric Netsch at their Santa Monica HQ. Image Credits: Tapcart
“Now, you can launch an app on our platform in a matter of weeks, where historically it would take up to a year if you wanted to custom build an app,” explains Mobasser. “And you can do it for a low monthly fee.”
Tapcart’s platform itself offers a simple drag-and-drop builder that allows anyone to create a mobile app for their existing Shopify store using tools to design their layout, customize the product detail pages, integrate checkout options, include product reviews, and even optionally add other branded content, like blogs, lookbooks, videos (including live video) and more. Everything is synced directly from Shopify to the app in real-time, so the merchant’s inventory, products and collections are all kept up-to-date. That’s a big differentiator from some rivals, which require duplicate sets of data and data transformation.
Tapcart, meanwhile, leverages all of Shopify’s APIs and SDKs to create a native application that works with Shopify’s existing data structures.
Image Credits: Tapcart
This tight integration with Shopify helps Tapcart because it doesn’t have to focus on the e-commerce infrastructure, as the way things are structured around inventory and collections are roughly 90% the same across brands. Instead, Tapcart focuses on the 10% that makes brands stand out from one another, which includes things like branding, content and design. Its CMS allows merchants to create exclusive content, change the colors and fonts, add videos and more to make the app look and feel fully customized.
Beyond the mobile app creation aspect to its business, Tapcart also helps merchants automate their marketing. Through the Tapcart platform, merchants can communicate with their customers in real-time using push notifications that can alert them to new sales, to encourage them to return to abandoned carts, or any other promotions. The marketing campaigns can be automated, as well, which helps merchants schedule their upcoming launches and product drops ahead of time. The company claims these push notifications deliver click-through rates that are 72% higher than a traditional email or SMS text because of their interactivity and branding.
Image Credits: Tapcart
The platform has quickly found traction with SMB to mid-market enterprise customers who have reached the stage of their business where it makes sense for them to double down on customer retention and conversion and optimize their mobile workflow.
“Our sweet spot is when you have maybe a couple hundred customers in your database,” notes Netsch. “That’s a perfect time to now focus less on the paid acquisition portion of your business and more on how to retain and engage those existing customers, [so they’ll] shop more and have a better experience,” he says.
During the past 12 months, over $1.2 billion in merchant sales have flowed through Tapcart’s platform. And in 2020, Tapcart’s recurring revenue increased by 3x, as mobile apps grew even faster during the pandemic, which had increased consumer mobile screen time by 20% year-over-year from 2019. Mobile commerce spending also grew 55% year-over-year, topping $53 billion globally during the holiday shopping season, the company says. Tapcart’s own merchants saw mobile app orders at a rate of more than once-per-second during this time, and it believes these trends will continue even as the pandemic comes to an end.
Today, Tapcart generates revenue by charging a flat SaaS (software-as-a-service) fee, which differentiates it from a number of competitors who charge a percent of the merchant’s total sales.
Image Credits: Tapcart
With the additional funding, Tapcart plans to focus on its goal of becoming a vertically integrated mobile commerce suite of tools, which more recently includes support for iOS App Clips. It will also soon release an upgraded version of its insights analytics platform and will offer scripts that merchants can install on their mobile websites to compare what works on the site versus what works in the app.
Later this year, Tapcart plans to launch a full marketing automation product that will allow brands to automate and personalize their notifications even further. And it plans to invest in market expansions to make its product better designed for mobile, global commerce.
The funding will allow Santa Monica-based Tapcart to hire another 200 people over the next 24 months, up from the 70 it has currently. These will include new additions across time zones and even in markets like Australia and Europe as it moves toward global expansion.
Shopify’s investment will open up a number of new opportunities as well, including on product, engineering, business strategy and partnerships. It will also help to get Tapcart in front of Shopify’s 1.7 million global merchants.
“There’s still quite a lot of merchants that need better mobile experiences, but have yet to really double down on the mobile effort and get something like a native app,” notes Netsch. “There’s a lot of different ways and methods that merchants are experimenting with mobile growth, and we’re trying to offer all of the best parts of that in a single platform. So there’s tons of expansion for Tapcart to do just that with the existing target addressable market,” he says.
“We believe brands must be where their customers are, and today that means being on their phones,” said Satish Kanwar, VP of product acceleration at Shopify, in a statement. “Tapcart helps merchants create mobile-first shopping experiences that customers love, reinforcing Shopify’s mission to make commerce better for everyone. We look forward to seeing Tapcart expand its success on Shopify with the more than 1.7 million merchants on our platform today.”
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Mobile commerce startup Via rounds up $15 million in Series A funding
Mobile commerce is where it’s at, and rising investment in so-called conversational commerce startups underscores the opportunity.
Via, a two-year-old, Bay Area-based startup, is among those riding the wave, having identified some trends that are becoming clearer by the month. First, more e-commerce sales will be on mobile phones this year than desktops (as much as 70% by some estimates), people tend to read text messages almost immediately and consumers spend upwards of 30 minutes a day engaging with mobile messaging apps.
Via also insists that unlike an expanding pool of startups that are focused on helping retailers and others broadcast their marketing messages in SMS, there’s room for a player to better address the many other pieces that add up to a happy consumer experience, from delivering coupon codes to starting the returns process.
Indeed, according to co-founder and CEO Tejas Konduru — a Brigham Young grad whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from India and who have themselves worked at tech startups — one insight his now 50-person company had early on was that despite that so many of their customers now use the mobile browser to visit and shop from their stores, many retailers use website builders like Shopify or BigCommerce to “cram everything everything into mobile, leaving only enough space for, like, one picture and a Buy button.” Konduru figured there must be a way to take the shopping experience that all these customers have with brands on their website and make them happen in a quick, mobile-native way.
Via’s solution, he says, is to help those businesses interact with customers on the devices and apps they use most often. “When someone uses Shopify or BigCommerce or any of those platforms,” says Konduru, “we also connect it to Via, and it basically takes the entire shopping experience and allows [customers] to quickly swipe right through a menu or like through a catalog on, for example, Facebook Messenger. Via will also create like a native iOS Android app by taking a website, cloning it into a native iOS Android app, then sell the push notification in-app chat layer. Essentially,” he adds, “anytime someone shops on the phone and they’re not using the browser is what Via is handling.”
The “message” seems to be getting through to the right people. Via, which launched last year, says it now employs 54 people on a full-time basis, has 190 brands as customers and just secured $15 million in Series A funding led by Footwork, the new venture firm co-founded by former Stitch Fix COO Mike Smith and former Shasta Ventures investor Nikhil Basu Trivedi.
Other participants in the round include Peterson Ventures, where Konduru once interned; famed founder Josh James of Domo, where Konduru also once interned; and a long list of other notable individual investors, including Ryan Smith of Qualtrics and Lattice co-founder and CEO Jack Altman.
As for how the company charges, it doesn’t ask for a monthly or yearly fee, as per traditional SaaS companies, but instead charges per interaction, whether that’s an SMS or a voice minute or video or a GIF.
It’s starting to add up, according to Konduru, who says that Via’s average customer is seeing 15 times return on its investment and that from May of 2020 — when the company’s service went live — through December, the company generated $51 million in sales. Konduru declined to say exactly how much Via saw from those transactions, but says the company is on track to reach $10 million in annual recurring revenue this year.
As for how brands get started with Via, it’s pretty simple, by the company’s telling. As long as a company is using a commerce platform — from Shopfiy to WooCommerce to Salesforce — it takes just five minutes or so to produce a mobile app with a menu featuring the types of interactions the brand can enable via Via’s platform, says Konduru.
Konduru, who dabbled in investment banking before deciding to launch Via, says he isn’t surprised by the startup’s fast traction, though he says he has been taken aback by the breadth of conversations the company sees. While he imagined Via would be a strong marketing channel for brands that use the platform to push out notifications about abandoned shopping carts and upcoming deliveries, it’s more of a two-way street than he’d imagined.
“Every month, there are maybe 15,000 people who start the returns process through Via and will get a notification from a channel that Via supports. But suddenly — let’s say the customer gets the wrong T-shirt size — people start communicating with the brand. You see everything from fan appreciation to address changes to messaging about bad discount codes to where’s-my-order type exchanges. That’s something I didn’t expect,” says Konduru, who says that before raising its Series A round, Via raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Peterson Ventures.
“I thought that people would just look at the notification and, like, move it into the abyss somewhere. Instead, people start interacting with the brand.”
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Half of Amazon app users have been switched to a new, swipe-based 1-Click checkout
Has Amazon’s ‘one-click’ checkout on mobile looked a little different to you lately? A number of users of Amazon’s mobile applications have recently reported seeing a new checkout option that replaces the click – well, on mobile, the tap – with a swipe instead. As it turns out, the option is part of a fairly large-scale test Amazon has underway. Currently… Read More
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Gametime raises $20 million to sell last-minute, textable tickets to sporting events and concerts
Gametime has raised $20 million in venture funding for an app that allows people to find and buy tickets to a nearby concert or sporting event at the last minute, and even up to a half-hour after a game begins.
Evolution Media Partners led Gametime’s Series B round, joined by GV, Stanford’s StartX Fund, Accel Partners, Casey Wasserman and Jeff Mallett.
The funding brings… Read More
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Pokémon Go is boosting competitor in-app purchase revenue, too
While Pokémon Go is definitely the primary benefactor of its own success, that doesn’t mean it’s hurting its competition in the mobile gaming space. New data from mobile commerce provider DOCOMO Digital has found that in fact, the Google Play Store’s top four grossing apps have seen a 10 percent increase in overall revenue from their games in Europe since the debut of… Read More
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Europe blocks O2-Three carrier merger in the UK
Europe’s Competition Commission has blocked a proposed merger that would have seen the number of major carriers in the UK mobile market reduced from four to three. Asia’s mobile-first economy and how the West is feeling the effects
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The New Wave Of Selling On Mobile And Social
The holiday season is here, and shoppers and merchants alike are gearing up for the busiest shopping season of the year. How will technology impact retail this season, and what’s new in 2015 about the ancient “art of the sale”? eMarketer predicts a happy holiday season for retailers this year, with US retail sales in the months of November and December increasing 5.7 percent… Read More
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Is Enterprise Hyper Growth The New Normal?
The enterprise cloud has entered a new era of hyper growth thanks to a combination of dramatically expanded global markets, access to unprecedented later-stage private growth capital and the ability to scale sales organizations with remote talent. As Google Looks To Expand Wallet Use, WePay Integrates Instant Buy API
Google is reportedly eyeing up an acquisition of Softcard to expand Google Wallet services to more points of sale with retailers; but it also wants to grow its position in the wider world of mobile-based transactions to compete with the likes of PayPal, by way of its Instant Buy API. Originally launched for Android in 2013, today the Instant Buy API is taking a step forward: Google is looking… Read More
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