Clearco

Clearco (formerly ClearBanc) is officially the world's largest eCommerce investor, having made over $2.2 billion in investments across over 5,500 eCommerce businesses, and growing quickly.

You go to their site, hit "Fund Me," add some data points around what you're looking for capital-wise, connect your sales channels - such as Shopify, Amazon, etc - and then you will be presented a few offers for working capital with a remittance rate of 1% - 20%, varying mostly based on your previous 180 days of sales. The more you take as related to your sales history, the higher the remittance rate will be.

After getting your offer and choosing to move forward, you'll complete signup by connecting your accounting tools, banking account (connected with Plaid), you will enter additional business and incorporation details (you do need to be incorporated in order to qualify), prove your identity, and sign an official contract and ACH/debit authorization form, and then you're in processing for a quick review by their internal team, work your way through diligence, and assuming you're approved, you will get capital typically within 48 hours.

Their insights dashboard gives a high level valuation of your business. Revenue growth, Average Order Value, ad spend as a percentage of revenue, and you can go in depth in average order value over time, refunds, marketing, and multiple different layers of analytics.

There are no monthly minimums. A revenue share agreement allows for flexibility based on your sales and Clearco offers strong account management and success for things like top-up funding. This allows them to offer a variety of products that help merchants across marketing, inventory, and raising investment.

With Clearco, there are no personal guarantees and funding is based completely on revenue and sales history.

There are very large upper bounds on financing options, with up to $10 million for larger brands, and around 48 hour turnaround time on average.

Clearco helps merchants improve working capital so that they can more quickly invest in marketing or inventory efforts. This allows you to scale faster, manage crunch times like Black Friday and Cyber Monday - where you need massive inventory and need to be spending a ton on advertising.

The person signing up should be the founder or business owner, sometimes the CFO or controller, but they are required to have at least 25% ownership in the company in order to successfully apply. You simply create an account and connect all of your accounts - from your eCommerce platform, ad platforms, bank, Google Analytics, and all of your marketing, accounting, and payment platforms. And then you can start receiving insights from them.

ClearAngel can provide capital in the form of a grant, access to guidance such as coaches, and a dashboard that shows sales, cost of acquisition, average order value, and gives you a letter grade to understand your score. The coach helps you focus on the weak parts of the business and improve them. You must have $2,000/month for the last 6 months in either wholesale or eCommerce.

ClearMatch suggests partners and tools that you should be using and helps facilitate those connections.

Clearco enables merchants to find working capital. Their working capital starts at a 12% flat fixed fee, however, if you use it for marketing or inventory, it will be reduced to a 6% flat fixed fee (remember they can see your bank info so they know where you are spending). A ballpark offer would be something around your last 6 months sales revenue.

They analyze your business every 14 days to help you understand if you can top off your account, get more capital, and re-infuse the business.

Clearco is best for brands that have a strong Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and know that if they increase ad spend, they can increase sales, but perhaps they are cash flow restricted here between inventory and ad spend.

They are also great for subscription brands who have good retention, for the same reason.

They are great for brands that have long lead times for inventory - if you are buying inventory 3, 6, or 9 months in advance and having to hold onto it, that can detriment cash flow, and Clearco can help you extend the gap.

They can't help brands in illegal substances, ingestible CBD products, weapons, and drop-shipping or full wholesale. Brand new stores can't use ClearAngel, but can sign up to the platform to use their free analytics and insights tool.

If you are crowdfunding through Indiegogo, they can advance you up to 50% of the funds collected once you've raised over $40,000. Perfect for reinvesting into marketing and blowing up your Indiegogo campaign.