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Goodbuy, launched in 2021, is a startup that gives shoppers small-business alternatives to bigger retailer websites. The company offers a browser extension that, when launched on a site like Amazon and Walmart, highlights other smaller brands that offer similar products. Goodbuy also launched a mobile shopping site that lets users search for brands based on different criteria such as product type, region or founder demographic.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to create a really efficient way to have folks be able to shop consciously,\u201d said co-founder Cara Oppenheimer. She joined this week\u2019s Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the idea behind Goodbuy and its plans for the future.<\/p>\n
Over the last year, Goodbuy has amassed a brand list of 180,000 companies it links out to, 40,000 user profiles and has helped facilitate nearly $2 million in sales. Now, the focus is on growing both the user and partner brand base \u2014 while finding new ways to monetize. That includes paid brand offerings, as well as growing affiliate business.<\/p>\n
In its first year of business, much of Goodbuy\u2019s focus has been around proven out the concept. While the future business model will be based on affiliate commerce \u2014 brands will pay Goodbuy a cut of the sale if a shopper used the platform to discover a product \u2014 Oppenheimer wanted to get more people to try the service out before she started charging a fee. So for last year, Goodbuy didn\u2019t charge a fee and instead focused on building out its list of brands and customer base. <\/p>\n
With that, she and her co-founder built a tech stack that would automatically onboard small brands into its search capabilities and then categorize them by different attributes. That is, a Goodbuy user could search for women-owned brands or companies that pledge to be more sustainable.<\/p>\n
Now, with tens of thousands of shoppers and growing brand attention, Oppenheimer plans on implementing the affiliate program this year.<\/p>\n
The hope is to create an online shopping experience that can rival Amazon, while still focusing on small businesses. But that will require scale.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of our priorities are around onboarding more businesses at scale,\u201d said Oppenheimer, \u201cso there\u2019s more opportunity for our consumers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.<\/p>\n
The thesis behind Goodbuy<\/strong> How Goodbuy onboarded its first businesses<\/strong> Why brands must use their own packaging<\/strong>
\u201cThe idea is to make conscious shopping super easy, and intercept all of the ways we\u2019ve trained ourselves to shop. We go right to Amazon \u2014 62% of all online shopping starts on Amazon. They\u2019re the Google for shopping; 70% of all online spending happens with 15 mega-retailers. So instead of playing [like] another DTC brand and [saying], \u2018Come to my marketplace,\u2019 we create tools that intersect the existing behavior to direct people to these incredible small businesses. So they\u2019re no longer on page 10 of your shopping results and your search results.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we launched Goodbuy, we believed we needed scale. You can\u2019t have a browser extension show up with the same three results over and over if you\u2019re trying to show up on top of Amazon. And so we thought, okay, we\u2019re never going to be able to acquire 40,000 businesses at scale rapidly at a low cost\u2026 So we built a series of really smart tools that use some third-party data but, most importantly, the proprietary tools that we built. [This] helped us identify businesses at various revenue targets \u2014 from Shopify and other platforms \u2014 at various scales across various categories. And then what we did was we built a unique tool that gave us a 99% accurate identification system for the 16 different business values and owner identities that we defined as important to the broad consumer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo the current onboarding, through Shopify, is a four-minute four-step process for an SMB. They answer like four questions, essentially saying the scale they are; they identify their owner identities and business values, should they choose to \u2014 it\u2019s not required. And then they identify the last important thing, which is that they don\u2019t fulfill products bought on their site directly in mega-retailer packaging. So we can\u2019t have a small business [send customers] an Amazon package. That\u2019s a really important aspect of our business. The experience that a customer has when moving through Goodbuy is one of joy and connectedness to small businesses. So that\u2019s the most important criteria; they can sell on Amazon, separately. But when someone buys directly from their site, through us, they can\u2019t receive that package there. And so that\u2019s really important.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n