Tictail

» see tictail.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Tictail was founded in Stockholm in 2011 by Carl Waldekranz with three co-founders, on a premise that sounds obvious now and was not then: a person who makes things should be able to open a shop online in the time it takes to make a coffee, without hiring anyone. No template licenses, no plugins to configure, no developer. Wired called it the Tumblr of e-commerce in 2012 and put it on its list of Europe's hottest startups, which for a Swedish company two years old was the whole marketing budget covered.

It built outward from there. A third-party app platform in September 2013, an iPhone app in 2014, and in May 2015 the ability to set up an entire store from a phone, which was genuinely first. Then in July 2015 came the pivot that mattered: a marketplace, so shoppers could browse across every brand on the platform instead of only finding a shop if they already knew its address. That round raised $22 million from Thrive Capital and Creandum. In January 2016 the company opened a physical store on Orchard Street in Manhattan to sell the same brands offline.

I never had a Tictail store. The DIY storefront wave reached Turkey around 2013 as GittiGidiyor listings and Facebook pages, and the people I knew who sold things online were selling on somebody else's marketplace rather than building their own front door. Tictail's whole pitch was that the front door was the point, and that argument had a shorter life than the company did.

In November 2018 Shopify bought Tictail for a reported fifteen to twenty million dollars, well under its last valuation and under the thirty-three million it had raised. The Orchard Street store closed with the deal. Merchants were given until 1 April 2019 to move their shops to Shopify, and on that date tictail.com stopped selling. Store owners could reach their dashboards for one more month, until 1 May, to get their data out.

~ the case file ~

~ the pivot that split it in two ~

Tictail started as a tool and ended as a destination, and those two businesses want opposite things. A tool wants every merchant to succeed on their own domain, with their own audience, paying a small fee forever. A marketplace wants the traffic to arrive at the marketplace, which means the merchant's own brand matters less every quarter. Tictail ran both from 2015 onward and the marketplace won internally, because it was the half that could show growth to investors.

That put the company head-on against Etsy on discovery and head-on against Shopify on tooling, from Stockholm, with a fraction of the money. Shopify never had to win that fight. It only had to wait and then write a check for less than the venture rounds had cost.

~ what got bought ~

Acquisitions at a discount to the money raised are usually about people, and the reporting at the time read this one that way. Shopify was not short of a store builder. What it took was a team that had spent seven years on the specific problem of making commerce software feel like something a designer would use, plus a New York office. Nothing of Tictail's product shipped forward under the name.

~ the five-month window ~

Between the announcement in November 2018 and the closure on 1 April 2019, every shop on the platform had to be rebuilt somewhere else. Shopify made the migration easy, which was the commercial logic of the purchase, and plenty of merchants went. The ones who did not were mostly the small European makers Tictail had been built for in the first place, who had picked it precisely because it was not the big platform.

tictail.com now redirects to shop.app, which is Shopify's consumer shopping front. The address still resolves and lands you somewhere that sells things. It just is not the shop you built.

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