Carted set out to unify online shopping under one “universal e-commerce API”. It then pivoted into a price-tracking app — and now, it’s shutting down.
What Was Carted:
Carted raised $13M in 2021 to solve a real, obvious pain: when you see a product online (in a video, a blog, a social feed), buying it is still very messy. You get bounced across tabs, stores, affiliate links, and sketchy Shopify pages. The founders wanted to erase all that.
They built a system that let publishers, apps, and platforms drop a universal “buy” layer right on top of the content. You could check out without ever leaving the page. Carted handled all the backend chaos: connecting to different merchants, splitting orders and tracking affiliates.
If it worked, every article, video, or post could instantly turn into a small marketplace. The idea made perfect sense, until the platforms did it themselves.
By 2023, TikTok and Instagram had rolled out native shopping. They didn’t need Carted’s API, they built their own. The platforms kept the user, the product, and the payment in-house.
So Carted pivoted. They turned the underlying tech into a consumer app instead. Now anyone could save products from across the internet, organize them into folders, compare options, and get price drop or restock alerts. Think Pinterest meets Honey.
The app launched in 2024 and found early fans. It solved a genuine pain: the chaos of modern shopping spread across 20 tabs and half a dozen stores. But like most consumer tools that live between discovery and checkout, it was easy to like and hard to monetize.
The Numbers:
🗓️ Founded: April 2021
💰 Seed Round: $13M (one of Australia’s largest seeds)
👥 Team Cut: 14 → 6 during 2023 build
🧪 Pivot: API to consumer price tracker app
📲 App Launch: 2024, with engaged early adopters
Reasons for Failure:
Big platforms got there first: TikTok Shop rolled hard from 2023 onward, and Instagram had already put checkout inside the feed back in 2019. At the same time, publisher-side competitors showed up with on-page checkouts, like Bolt buying Tipser to let readers buy “on any digital surface.” And even where full checkout wasn’t needed, link-in-bio and affiliate pipes were good enough for creators and media: Linktree’s Store Link pushed shoppable listings right in bio.
The pivot weakened the business model. The consumer app was clean and useful, but alerts, lists, and sharing are easy to clone and hard to monetize at scale. If you don’t control the checkout, you don’t control the take rate. Without a crisp plan for merchant SaaS, affiliate unit economics, or paid features, growth becomes marketing spend. A pivot should shorten the path to cash, not just to love.
Timing collided with AI-led, agentic shopping. The narrative moved toward agents that generate options, compare prices, and place orders across stores. That shift made “universal API” feel like yesterday’s layer. It also hit fundraising and partnerships, because buyers and investors chase where demand is created, not where it is forwarded.
Why It Matters:
Don’t build on borrowed distribution. If your product depends on platforms that can replace you with a feature toggle, you don’t have a moat, you have a countdown.
If you pivot to consumer, lock the revenue model on day one. Don’t wait for scale to set pricing. Decide your take rate, SaaS fee, or premium features early.
Solve a pain, not a friction. Frictions get engineered away by whoever owns the platform. Pains stick around long enough to build a company on.