Cart.com

Founded in September 2020 by Jim Jacobsen and CEO Omair Tariq, a former Home Depot and Blinds.com executive, Cart.com is an Austin, Texas e-commerce platform providing end-to-end software, services, and logistics infrastructure. The company enables mid-market merchants and enterprise brands to manage complex inventory, supply chains, and order fulfillment across sales channels like Amazon and TikTok. Operating as an e-commerce as a service provider, the firm pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy, purchasing nine companies in fourteen months while investing $5 million to acquire its domain name. This rapid expansion helped the organization reach roughly $100 million in revenue and 80 employees by its first anniversary. Achieving a unicorn valuation exceeding $1 billion in under three years, this rapid success led to Tariq being named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 finalist.

# Cart.com: Unified Commerce Infrastructure for the Modern E-Commerce Era

High-Level Overview

Cart.com is an American technology company headquartered in Houston, Texas, that provides unified commerce and logistics solutions for B2C, B2B, and public sector organizations[1][2]. The company builds an integrated platform that combines e-commerce software, fulfillment services, marketing capabilities, and analytics tools—essentially offering merchants a single operating system to manage omnichannel selling and order fulfillment[1][2]. Rather than forcing businesses to stitch together disparate tools from multiple vendors, Cart.com solves the fundamental fragmentation problem in e-commerce by providing end-to-end capabilities from product listing through delivery[6].

The company serves over 6,000 customers worldwide and processes more than 70 million orders annually across 8.5 million square feet of fulfillment space[3]. Cart.com's value proposition is particularly compelling for mid-market and emerging brands that lack the scale to build these capabilities internally but need enterprise-grade infrastructure to compete with larger retailers. By owning the entire value chain—from software to physical logistics—Cart.com can deliver economies of scale that smaller merchants couldn't otherwise access[6].

Origin Story

Cart.com was founded in October 2020 by Jim Jacobsen and Omair Tariq, alongside co-founders Remington Tonar and Henry Hanley[1]. Jacobsen brought deep entrepreneurial experience as the co-founder and former CEO of RTIC Outdoors, a direct-to-consumer brand, and as co-founder of alliantgroup. Tariq came from the e-commerce operations side, having served as an executive at blinds.com, a custom blinds provider that was later acquired by The Home Depot[1]. This founding team combined both the merchant perspective (understanding pain points of selling online) and operational expertise (managing complex fulfillment and logistics).

The company's origin story reflects a clear market insight: merchants selling through Amazon or Shopify faced significant pain points when trying to scale across multiple channels[1]. Rather than building yet another standalone tool, the founders recognized that the real opportunity lay in creating a unified platform that could eliminate the fragmentation plaguing the industry. The company moved quickly from founding to acquisition strategy—by January 2022, just over a year after launch, Cart.com had acquired FB Flurry, a third-party logistics provider with over 2 million square feet of distribution capacity, and SellerActive, a multi-channel management software platform[1]. This aggressive consolidation strategy signaled the company's ambition to become a comprehensive commerce infrastructure provider.

Core Differentiators

Vertical Integration Across the Commerce Value Chain

Unlike point-solution competitors, Cart.com owns both the software layer and the physical fulfillment infrastructure[2][6]. This integrated model enables the company to optimize the entire merchant journey—from listing products across channels to intelligent order routing to final delivery. The company's proprietary warehouse management system, order management system, and distributed order management capabilities work in concert with its fulfillment network[4].

Unified Data and AI-Powered Insights

Cart.com's breadth across the commerce value chain generates rich, cross-channel data that feeds into AI-powered analytics and prescriptive recommendations[2]. Merchants gain visibility into performance across all channels simultaneously, enabling more informed decisions about inventory allocation, marketing spend, and operational optimization. This data advantage compounds as the platform scales.

Technology-Enabled Fulfillment Infrastructure

The company deploys advanced automation including goods-to-person robotic storage systems, ASRS robots, automated conveyors, and continuous loop sortation systems[4]. This tech-forward approach to logistics reduces costs and improves speed while maintaining flexibility to handle specialized requirements (food, pharma, medical products)[4]. The 24/7/365 customer service support and API-first architecture ensure seamless integration with existing merchant systems[4].

Speed and Agility in a Rapidly Evolving Market

Cart.com positions itself as capable of moving faster than the market itself, enabling merchants to quickly launch on new marketplaces, connect stores, and expand internationally with minimal friction[6]. This operational agility is a genuine competitive advantage in an industry where new sales channels and regulations emerge constantly.

Role in the Broader Tech Landscape

Cart.com sits at the intersection of several powerful macro trends reshaping retail and e-commerce. The shift toward omnichannel commerce—where customers expect seamless experiences across online marketplaces, direct-to-consumer websites, social commerce, and physical retail—has created urgent demand for unified infrastructure[2][3]. No single merchant can efficiently manage inventory, orders, and fulfillment across 10+ different channels using disconnected tools.

The company is also riding the wave of supply chain digitalization and the growing sophistication of third-party logistics providers. As merchants increasingly outsource fulfillment to focus on brand and customer acquisition, the logistics provider that can offer integrated software and data insights gains significant competitive advantage[2]. Cart.com's model—combining 3PL services with software—positions it to capture more value and stickiness than traditional logistics providers.

Additionally, Cart.com benefits from the maturation of the e-commerce software market. The early wave of e-commerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce) solved the problem of getting online; the next wave solves the problem of scaling efficiently across channels. This represents a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity, particularly as mid-market merchants seek alternatives to building custom integrations or managing multiple vendor relationships[6].

The company's influence on the broader ecosystem is notable: by demonstrating that unified commerce infrastructure can work at scale, Cart.com is reshaping how merchants think about their technology stack and how investors evaluate e-commerce infrastructure opportunities.

Quick Take & Future Outlook

Cart.com has positioned itself as the operating system for omnichannel commerce at a moment when fragmentation is becoming untenable for growing merchants. The company's willingness to own the entire value chain—a capital-intensive but defensible strategy—differentiates it from pure software competitors and creates multiple revenue streams and customer lock-in mechanisms.

Looking ahead, Cart.com's trajectory will likely be shaped by several factors: continued consolidation of the e-commerce software and logistics markets, the rise of AI-driven supply chain optimization, and the increasing importance of international commerce. The company's ability to expand its customer base beyond e-commerce into B2B and public sector verticals suggests significant runway for growth. As merchants face mounting pressure to compete on speed, cost, and customer experience, the value of a truly unified platform—one that eliminates the friction of managing dozens of disconnected vendors—will only increase.

The fundamental insight that drove Cart.com's founding remains as relevant today as it was in 2020: commerce is fragmented, and that fragmentation is expensive. Companies that can provide genuine unification, backed by both software and operational excellence, will capture disproportionate value in the next decade of e-commerce evolution.