Tapcart, a ‘Shopify for Mobile Apps’, Raises $50M Series B – TechCrunch

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 dubbed itself “Shopify for Mobile Apps”, today powers shopping apps for top brands including Fashion Nova, Pier One Imports, The Hundreds, Patta, Culture Kings and thousands more. . After a year of 3X revenue growth, driven in part by the pandemic, Tapcart today announces the closing of a $50 million Series B funding round, led by Left Lane Capital. Having clearly taken note of Tapcart’s traction with its own merchant base, Shopify is among the participants in the round.

SignalFire, Greycroft, Act One Ventures and Amplify LA are among the other investors in the round.

Tapcart co-founders Sina Mobasser and Eric Netsch have been working in the mobile app industry for years. Mobasser’s former 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 to help online merchants bring their businesses to mobile as easily as they could go online with Shopify.

“Now you can launch an app on our platform in weeks, whereas before it took up to a year if you wanted to build a custom app,” says 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 its layout, customize pages product details, integrate payment options, include product reviews and even possibly add other branded content, like blogs, lookbooks, videos (including live videos) and more. Everything is synced directly from Shopify to the app in real time, so the merchant’s inventory, products, and collections are all up-to-date. This is a big differentiator from some rivals, which require duplicate data sets and data transformation.

Tapcart, on the other hand, leverages all of Shopify’s APIs and SDKs to build a native app that works with Shopify’s existing data structures.

Picture credits: Tapcart

This tight integration with Shopify helps Tapcart as it doesn’t have to focus on e-commerce infrastructure as the way things are structured around inventory and collections is pretty much the same for all brands. . Instead, Tapcart focuses on the 10% that sets brands apart from each other, which includes things like branding, content, and design. Its CMS allows merchants to create exclusive content, change colors and fonts, add videos and much more to give the app a fully customized look and feel.

Beyond the aspect of building mobile apps for 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, encourage them to return to abandoned carts or any other promotions. Marketing campaigns can also be automated, helping merchants plan their upcoming product launches and deliveries in advance. The company claims that these push notifications deliver 72% higher click-through rates than a traditional email or text message due to their interactivity and branding.

Picture credits: Tapcart

The platform has quickly found traction with customers from SMBs to midsize companies that have reached the stage in their business where it makes sense for them to double customer retention and conversion and optimize their workflow. mobile.

“Our sweet spot is when you have maybe a few hundred customers in your database,” Netsch notes. “Now is a great time to now focus less on the paid acquisition part 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.

Over the past 12 months, more than $1.2 billion in merchant sales have passed through Tapcart’s platform. And in 2020, Tapcart’s recurring revenue grew 3x as mobile apps grew even faster during the pandemic, increasing consumers’ mobile screen time by 20% year over year. another from 2019. Mobile commerce spending also grew 55% year-over-year. year, topping $53 billion worldwide during the holiday shopping season, according to the company. Tapcart’s own merchants have seen mobile app orders at a rate of more than once per second during this time, and he believes these trends will continue even as the pandemic comes to an end.

Today, Tapcart generates revenue by charging a fixed SaaS (software as a service) fee, which differentiates it from a number of competitors who charge a percentage of the merchant’s total sales.

Picture credits: Tapcart

With the additional funding, Tapcart plans to focus on its goal of becoming a vertically integrated mobile commerce tool suite, which most recently includes support for iOS App Clips. It will also soon release an improved version of its insights analytics platform and offer scripts that marketers 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 comprehensive marketing automation product that will allow brands to further automate and personalize their notifications. And it plans to invest in market expansion to make its product better designed for mobile and global commerce.

The funding will allow Santa Monica-based Tapcart to hire an additional 200 people over the next 24 months, up from 70 currently. These will include new additions across time zones and even in markets like Australia and Europe as it heads for global expansion.

Shopify’s investment will also open up a number of new opportunities, including product, engineering, business strategy, and partnerships. It will also help put Tapcart ahead of Shopify’s 1.7 million global merchants.

“There are still a lot of merchants who need better mobile experiences, but haven’t really doubled down on their mobile efforts and got something like a native app yet,” Netsch notes. “There are many different ways and methods that merchants are experimenting with mobile growth, and we’re trying to deliver all of the best parts of that on one platform. So there’s tons of expansion for Tapcart to do just that with the existing target addressable market,” he says.

“We believe brands should be where their customers are, and today that means being on their phones,” Satish Kanwar, vice president of product acceleration at Shopify, said in a statement. “Tapcart helps merchants create mobile-first shopping experiences that customers love, furthering Shopify’s mission to make commerce better for everyone. We look forward to seeing Tapcart expand its success on Shopify with over 1.7 million merchants on our platform today.