One of the areas that I expect to explode in the next 12 to 18 months is distributed commerce.
One of the earliest players in this space is Cartfly – a start-up out of Phoenix, that is attempting to enable individuals and small businesses to leverage the social web to drive sales.
The user flow goes something like this: you set up your store on Cartfly.com and populate your store with products. For each product, you can upload an image, write a description, and specify attributes like sizes available.
You are then provided embed code that you can drop into the site of your choice. Any embedded store can be grabbed right from the widget without visiting Cartfly.com, and new products that you add to your store via your Cartfly control panel immediately show up anywhere your store has been embedded.
This is “write once, publish many” applied to ecommerce.
The process to set up a store is painless, aided greatly be a gorgeous, clean design. A look at Cartfly’s management team will show you that they are loading up on folks who cut their chops at widget powerhouses such as Clearspring and Photobucket.
From a buyer perspective, you are able to interact with a product and seller via the embedded store by viewing a large photo, viewing a product description, and checking the seller’s reputation. Wisely, Cartfly doesn’t attempt to create yet another seller reputation system – they instead show existing profiles associated with the seller’s email from existing services such as Rapleaf, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and more. Buyers can also “add to cart” via the widget.
The one thing that buyers can’t do from the embedded store is actually purchase the product – for this, you click through to the seller’s hosted store on Cartfly.com.
Cartfly makes money by taking a 3% cut of the transaction, and transactions are powered by PayPal.
Cartfly is a slick and professional effort. The only gaps that I noticed in the system were the lack of integration of sophisticated sharing tools such as those provided by services like Clearspring and Gigya. Manually embedding code seems a bit passé. Based on my conversation with co-founder Josh Manley, it’s only a matter time before more robust sharing tools are added.
While distributed commerce is a huge, untapped opportunity, there are also some monster, savvy companies such as Amazon and eBay starting to dip their toes in the water. Cartfly’s challenge will be to gain momentum and traction and mindshare before Amazon and eBay really get after it.
As we all know, widgets can propagate in a hurry. Cartfly seems to be checking all the right boxes to make a serious run at this space.
Here’s my Cartfly store – the armoire really is for sale. The Mexican Beer Sampler, alas, is not.
