In this episode of Add To Cart, our partner content is brought to you by Wayflyer who deliver eCommerce funding – built for growth. And joining me, their Co-founder and CEO Aidan Corbett – all the way from Ireland. In this episode we dive into how eCommerce founders can get access to short term finance in order to fuel growth – often in areas such as marketing and inventory, which can hold eCommerce businesses back without free cash flow. For those who haven’t heard of Wayflyer, they were founded in 2019 and today, have over 1,000 eCommerce customers all over the world. In this short amount of time, they have delivered $700m of funding for eCommerce businesses. They now have an office and a team in Sydney and have helped unlock growth for Australian eCommerce brands such as Stax, King Kong Apparel and Black Swallow. In this chat with Aidan we walk through the process for founders to access Wayflyer funding. The most interesting part for me is how they integrate with eCommerce platforms and ad networks to make qualified decisions on eCommerce businesses – it’s not your old school bank manager here. Additionally, offers get made in quick time and can be as little as a few thousand dollars. But even if you are not a founder, you’re going to get some great insights from the ep, tapping into Aidan’s global view across their clients. We dive into the types of customer acquisition costs retailers are seeing across the board, why TikTok is still a developing opportunity and how having cash flow frees you up for long term thinking and experimentation.
“I would always say take on money as early as possible to give your self the headspace and the room to grow and actually think long term“
Aidan Corbett
Co-founder & CEO, Wayflyer
Revenue-based finance
“Wayflyer essentially provides short term finance for e-commerce companies, and e-commerce companies have one of the more challenging financing arrangements that any business have. And the main reason is, because they have to pay for inventory and marketing upfront before they generate revenue. And in the case of inventory, they often have to pay for inventory far in advance of when that inventory generates revenue.
What Wayflyer does for e-commerce merchants, is we give you money to pay for inventory and to pay for marketing. And you pay us back as a percentage of daily sales, or daily revenue. And that’s why it’s called revenue-based finance.”
The measure of success
“The big thing is CAC to LTV. So, how much are you acquiring a customer for? And then typically within six months, how much are you monetizing them? We would also look at a more base level at your margins to see that you’re making enough margin for you to generate your own cash over time.
And then the last thing that we would look at is obviously the cash balance. And within your cash balance then, basically how long it takes you to take an inventory, how often you actually order inventory, all those components around the supply chain. But the principal thing for us is the CAC to LTV ratio, because if that’s positive, everything else can be sorted with a financing solution.”
It’s not too late to Tik Tok
“For us and a small segment of our customer base, TikTok is having a huge impact at the moment. Where last year it may have been less than 5% of total ad spend, this year it’s 20%, 30% and growing. And that’s a huge boom for e-commerce merchants to have another outlet, and to have another outlet that really has the volume of users that can give you that really granular audience that Facebook, Instagram has been able to give you in the past.
Because some of the other platforms, like Twitter for example, it’s not suitable for direct to consumer marketing. TikTok is, and it’s great to have a second really big outlet, I think, for merchants. And they’ll take off this year in 2022.”
Questions answered in this episode include…
- What are the typical pain points or eCommerce hurdles that you find Wayflyer helping founders overcome?
- How do the commercials work from a retailer perspective?
- What retailers are you enabling globally and here in Australia?
