E-commerce startup Carted will close next week, four years after raising $13 million in one of Australia’s largest seed funding rounds and pledging to change how people shop online.
The Carted wishlist app, which informs shoppers when coveted items go on sale, will close on Wednesday, October 22.
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“We’ve loved building Carted with you, but we haven’t reached the scale we need to keep building the experience you deserve,” the startup told social media followers on Tuesday.
“After reviewing strategic options, the decision was made to wind down operations,” co-founder Holly Cardew told SmartCompany.
“It was a business decision based on current market conditions and the company’s long-term outlook.”
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Cardew and ex-Shopify engineer Mike Angell launched Carted in April 2021, after working together on Vop, an early pioneer of ‘shoppable’ TikTok feeds.
Carted’s core product — a universal commerce API, promising an alternative to clunky out-of-app checkouts and redirected affiliate links — caught the attention of major investors.
Blackbird led its major 2021 seed funding round, with contributions from Grok Ventures and Tidal Ventures.
“Through universal commerce, content platforms can allow creators to sell and attract revenue from any product on the web,” Blackbird wrote in its investment notes.
“The vision for Carted is to turn all content creators into merchants, all content platforms into marketplaces and all content consumption into a potential revenue-bearing ecommerce transaction.”
But the startup faced competition from the likes of TikTok and Instagram themselves, which added their own in-house commerce functions.
Other homegrown startups, like Linktree, gave social media users more ways to shop without straying too far from the newsfeed.
Angell departed the startup in the months after securing seed funding, and in 2023, while working on its debut product, Carted reduced its headcount from 14 to six.
The startup eventually found a home for its API in the public-facing Carted app, which allows shoppers to save any product available online and receive notifications when those goods are restocked or placed on sale.
“We explored different ways to apply our technology to make online shopping easier and more useful for people,” said Cardew.
“The current product iteration was one of the approaches we tested, and it received positive feedback from users for its simplicity and convenience.”
The app, launched in 2024, gained an “active community of early adopters”, she continued.
But a rapidly changing e-commerce sector, and the rise of agentic commerce and AI-driven shopping experiences, challenged Carted and the role of its core API.
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The founder said she was most proud of “building a product that was used and loved by shoppers,” and those Carted users have shared their sadness at the news.
“Thank you so much for making shopping so much easier, saving me money and keeping my camera roll free of dozens of screenshots,” wrote one Instagram follower.
“How will I ever go back to saving my aspirational purchases in spreadsheets?”
“Gutted, I used this app religiously,” said another.
“Thank you for being part of the Carted community and bringing the product to life,” Cardew told its loyal users.
“We backed Carted because we believed in the ambition to make online shopping smarter and more connected,” wrote Wendell Keunemann, managing partner at Carted investor Tidal Ventures.
“While the outcome wasn’t what anyone hoped for, we remain proud to have supported a founder who consistently pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in commerce,” he added.
