While the rise of e-commerce has given us more opportunities to browse and shop than ever before, it doesn’t imply we’re actually buying as much. According to the Baymard Institute, which Shopify cites, over 70% of shopping carts are abandoned on desktop, with that number only increasing on mobile and tablet. Carrot, Bobby Ghoshal’s newest business with co-founder Ramin Bozorgzadeh, aims to make a dent in that number.
Carrot is a browser extension that stores and categorizes the items in your shopping basket.
Kindred Ventures, M13, Abstract, Designer Fund, Combine, Paris Hilton, Scott Belsky, Riverpark, and NextView are among the investors who contributed to the $5.5 million seed round.
Carrot’s “secret sauce” is its ability to collect what you’ve put in your basket without any additional buttons or signals, regardless of which merchant you’re using. The technology records the activity of adding to cart and saves the information, including price and merchant, in the plug-in.
Carrot categorizes carts automatically based on the store, but consumers can also create their own folders. Let’s imagine you’re looking for lamps and you’re looking at a few different stores. Within Carrot, you can create a lighting folder and compare pricing and styles.
The program also keeps track of price changes for items in a user’s cart, allowing them to notice when anything goes on sale.
Users can create registries to send to their friends and family using Carrot. Carrot’s registry product is more of an extension of the company’s main use case, and it hasn’t been fully developed yet. In other words, if you send a page of wish list items to your friends and family, they will have no idea whether someone has purchased one item or another, which means you, may end up with duplicates. However, the team claims to be working on such feature.
Ghoshal is a serial entrepreneur. He was the head of design and growth at WeWork and co-founded Candid, which garnered over $150 million. For his part, Bozorgzadeh was a founder engineer at WeWork, as well as the head of engineering at WeWork Labs and a founding engineer at Etsy.
Carrot is now only available on the PC, but the startup has given a means for mobile users to save their shopping carts. According to Ghoshal, user feedback suggested that shoppers preferred to text products to their cart using a Carrot-provided number. Users were already emailing themselves products they intended to buy later, according to the concept.
