The world is your store

Today TAGS (formerly Boost), announces its new name and $3.5 million in pre-seed funding. Check us out on Product Hunt and you can read more about our launch on Business Wire & Axios!

Instant purchasing has always been one of the great promises of the digital age — even if we didn’t know what to call it at the time. When the digital space was young and Friends ruled broadcast TV, we were teased that one day, if we happened to like the sweater Ross or Rachel was wearing, we’d be able to click on the screen or voice command our digital butler, to buy that sweater for ourselves, instantly. From the very beginning, frictionless commerce was baked into our dreams of what the internet could be. Unfortunately, a variety of intermediate checkout solutions and social media off-ramps have obscured the power of that original promise.

TAGS is the breakthrough that makes the dream real. It’s real, and it’s here, today.

Websites are so ‘90s

It’s fair to ask: if the notion of instant and ubiquitous checkouts have been part of the promise of the Internet from the start, why haven’t they happened yet? The short answer is that e-commerce is hard, it’s complicated and old. It’s a foreign set of body parts, sewn together like a grumpy Frankenstein. It’s difficult to do commerce, difficult to build a high-performing website, difficult to get people to visit it, and difficult to get them to buy something once they’re there.

The long answer is that in order to acclimate their wary users to the novelty of online shopping, early developers utilized markers of the retail shopping experience like the shopping cart and the checkout. 40 years later, that choice has saddled e-commerce with some very heavy 20th-century baggage. The online stores that freed customers from the restrictions of brick-and-mortar have become a variant of the model that they were supposed to have overturned. Websites have become the new brick-and-mortar.

We shop differently today. For years, we identified a need, figured out what to buy, and then shopped for that product. The digital space — with social media as the great accelerator — made shopping a reactive proposition. As Steve Jobs famously asserted, “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Today, people learn about products from friends, content and influencers. Purchases are driven by an organic impulse of desire rather than by the persuasion of an ad campaign.

The psychology of shopping has changed, but the technology to harness that seismic shift has yet to appear. Shopping runs aground on the friction of leaving content to visit an online store and the multi-step process that purchasing requires. The online store carries us further away, in both space and time, from that point of purchase intent. Purchase intent weakens with distance, like an echo.

That difficulty is compounded by the inevitable drive towards online privacy — for instance, the recent laws surrounding iOS 14. New limitations on pixel tracking and user data aggregation now require brands to commit even heavier marketing spend to reach the same audience. The market is now experiencing an ever-wider shotgun spray of purchased impressions masquerading as a target market. Sellers are spending more, discounting more and owning less — it’s unsustainable.

When inefficient marketing meets weak purchase intent, commerce gets aborted. In 2022 Q1, a staggering 85% of shopping carts filled by mobile users were left abandoned. The current model simply fails to maximize transactional potential at the moment where and when purchase intent is at its strongest — that thrilling moment of first discovery, whether online or offline.

Shopping has always bound itself to the spatial logic of brick-and-mortar: Checkout comes at the end of the process. But what if all of commerce broke free of that logic? What if checkout was not the end of the process, but the beginning? Enter TAGS.

Thinking bigger.

What if, instead of trying to get the world to your store, the world became the store? That is the promise of TAGS. No websites. No landing pages. No downloads. No hardware. Just commerce — pure, unmediated, instant, and dispersed. A “buy” button for everywhere.

Our platform generates Tags, distributable checkouts, each unique and encoded with transactional, product, and marketing attribution — think of them as smart barcodes. Tags appear in a variety of formats, allowing them to be placed on every kind of media, app or content platform with no integration or permission required: social, print, streaming, billboards, products, audio, and even augmented reality in the coming months.

Buyers activate Tags utilizing the tools they already have. You can click, scan, tap, text, speak and, soon, see a Tag to activate it. Buyers experience a pre-loaded cart, with one-click functionality to buy right then and there. The result is a vibrant and distributed mesh of transactional potential, extending in every direction, offering near-infinite connections between buyers and sellers. Tags turn the world into the store.

Tags 3.0

Today we launch several new products that enable the organic distribution of commerce. First, our end-to-end ecommerce product “Kiosk” enables anyone to sell omnichannel in 2 minutes with no website or coding required. Sellers, creators, influencers and agencies can place Tags on content, bio links, packaging, stories and more. Generate Tags for your Shopify products, or add products natively to Kiosk — to start monetizing everywhere. It’s a new layer of commerce that perpetually drives conversions instead of impressions, with no ad spend required. Your content is your commerce.

TAGS is also launching our first website integration “Save for Later” to automate Tag distribution for existing e-commerce stores. According to Stripe’s recent report, 87% of abandoned checkouts are never followed up on. Not ready to buy? Sellers can place “Save for Later” to product pages and capture top-of-funnel purchase intent. Each customer who wasn’t quite ready to buy will receive a text message with a Link Tag, one-click over SMS. Think of Save for Later as a global wish list with one-click conversions when the buyer is ready to go.

Soon, we’ll be launching our “Affiliates” and “Dropshop” capabilities that automate affiliate acquisition and then enable those affiliates to sell any product, from any website, on any format of content — and get paid commissions on those sales, automatically. Rather than driving impressions or utilizing coupon codes, conversions are generated by authentic forces pushing outwards, instead of paid impressions pushing inwards.

It’s time.

Every new piece of tech strives to be the great disruptor of its sector. Only a handful live up to that claim. Here’s why TAGS is poised to make good on its disruptive potential as the infrastructure of distributed commerce (thanks for that line Packy McCormick).

This is just the beginning. We tend to think of the digital revolution as something that has already happened. But the arc of change is longer than we know. Shopping is a $23 trillion marketplace; currently, only 20% of shopping occurs online. As the shift to digital marketplaces continues, TAGS is positioned to scale with and accelerate that process.

Mobile shopping sucks. Smartphones do many things very well, but their attempt to replicate the desktop browser experience represents one of its fundamental limitations. TAGS’ headless checkout and one-click simplicity remove the cumbersome website store experience altogether.

No one platform can win. Siloed, platform-based e-commerce models are fighting the current of market efficiency. Instagram Commerce isn’t going to work on TikTok; TikTok Commerce won’t work on Twitch; and so on. By its very nature, the market will gravitate towards platform-agnostic solutions. TAGS is built to be ubiquitous and permissionless.

Offline meets online. The way we shop is going to continue to change. Brick-and-mortar footprints will shrink as new kinds of “real estate” become available via augmented reality and VR/Metaverse-style communities. Sellers are going to need tools that work across all of these media, products designed for easy integration and a unified, intuitive UI.

People-powered commerce. More and more, purchases are driven by individuals — influencers, content creators, etc. — and will continue to be, rather than by ad campaigns or SEO. TAGS empower networks of individuals, affiliates, artisans, aggregators and everyone in between, to sell anything, anywhere instantly.

Data gets so messy. Working as a “smart barcode”, TAGS consolidates transactional data, buyer information, attribution trends, geolocation and demographics in one accessible package. There’s room to grow and customize as well. Future tracked data might include product history, purchase history and sourcing, carbon footprint, etc.

The future of commerce.

In the first days of the web, its designers adopted the mantra “information wants to be free”. Today, it’s commerce that “wants to be free”, unshackled from an infrastructure with its roots still planted firmly in the 20th century. Commerce is begging to be dispersed, decentralized and democratized. TAGS unlock that liberating power, allowing opportunities to find the customer, wherever they are. Transactional energy doesn’t flow inward, towards a store, but outward, towards the market itself.

The age of “free information” ultimately came to pass with the development and widespread adoption of WiFi. Finally, you could access any information, anywhere. The promise of TAGS is to tap into that dynamic mesh comprised of millions of purchase points. TAGS are the Wi-Fi of commerce. We believe TAGS is poised to become a cornerstone of the next phase of the internet, a scalable piece of API bedrock that powers the next generation of commerce, creating the largest marketplace in history. The future of commerce has arrived, it’s here — and it’s everywhere.

A very special thank you to my incredible team, supportive family, and bold investors who have helped make this day possible. We offering TAGS free for 1 year with the promo code FREE. Signup today and turn the world into your store!