Cart.com has been one of Austin's most exciting and fastest-growing startups since it moved its headquarters here in 2021 with $240 million in fresh funding.
Now, after opening its new office downtown and going on a hiring and acquisition spree, Cart.com is dialing it back. The company this week made an undisclosed number of layoffs in one of the latest signs that the once red hot market for e-commerce software is cooling.
At least a dozen Cart employees indicated on LinkedIn that they had been laid off since Jan. 5. The company declined to share details, but a company spokesperson offered the following statement:
"Cart.com has delivered tremendous growth over the past two years, including making a number of key acquisitions that have fueled our rapid expansion. To maintain our competitive edge and growth trajectory through 2023 and beyond, we are pursuing a number of priorities that required us to reevaluate our organizational structure and make difficult decisions in order to realign our teams. These moves will best position us to build on what we’ve accomplished in the last two years and become an indelible part of the commerce economy."
The layoffs came abruptly, according to a blog post on Medium by Nicole Lillian Mark, a data visualization engineer at Cart.com who is based in Tampa, Florida. She wrote that her layoff was conducted over a Zoom call without video.
She took the layoffs in stride.
"So, thank you, Cart.com, for relieving me of the uncomfortable awkwardness and hassle of resignation, and for the couple of weeks of paid time off your severance package will afford me," she wrote.
But it was more difficult for many others.
"LinkedIn posts from some of them were heartbreaking," she wrote. "A colleague told me they cried all day. I wasn’t heavily invested in the company, but that person was. They loved their job and did it well. The best I’ve seen that particular job done, ever. I hope they land the most amazing role on the planet."
Cart.com, led by co-founder and CEO Omair Tariq, had made a couple acquisitions and had been on a hiring spree in the months leading up to the layoffs.
In early 2022, Cart.com told Austin Inno it was planning to add 150 people over the course of a year. That would have added to roughly 150 people already working in Austin at the time.
Cart.com is among a long list of high-flying startups that raised large rounds of venture capital and grew quickly during the boomy startup years that stretched from late 2020 through early 2022. Many of those companies, including several in Austin, have been forced to make layoffs — a sign that the companies may have grown too quickly as the economy tumbled downward in 2022.
Austin-based e-commerce software maker BigCommerce in late 2022 cut its workforce by 13%.
"We are implementing changes that will enhance the strength of our financial profile against the backdrop of a challenging economic environment," BigCommerce CEO Brent Bellm stated at the time.
E-commerce company Shopify cut 10% of its workforce as demand tapered off in 2022, as well.
Meanwhile, Homeward, The Zebra, ZenBusiness, Spreetail, Khoros, Nyriad, Rev.com, Wheel, Core Scientific and Workrise were among Austin-based tech companies that made layoffs in 2022. Across the global tech startup ecosystem, 1,020 companies made layoffs in 2022, impacting nearly 154,000 employees, according to Layoffs.FYI.
So far in 2023, Layoffs.FYI has logged more than 18,000 layoffs across 37 tech companies, which includes big layoffs at Amazon and Salesforce.
