Aishling Flaherty has always believed in buying local and trying to support Irish-owned businesses through their e-commerce sites. What she found frustrating, however, was having to shop across multiple sites for what she wanted instead of being able to buy from a range of different Irish retailers in one place.

Having looked and found nothing that approximated the kind of marketplace she thought was needed, Flaherty took matters into her own hands. In 2021, she began working on what has since become Caboodle, an e-commerce platform designed to make it easier and more affordable for consumers to shop directly from small Irish businesses.

“Caboodle’s technology is not about creating yet another online shop. It’s designed to solve a bigger problem,” Flaherty says. “It gives dozens of independent businesses some of the shared infrastructure, convenience and economies of scale enjoyed by much larger e-commerce players without taking away their independence.”

Flaherty is a scientist by background who works in academia, but she’d always had an interest in starting a business. That said, she wanted it to be a “passion project”, and building a platform that offered shopping convenience while also supporting Irish SMEs ticked the boxes.

What stood between Flaherty and making her idea happen was money. A platform on the scale she envisaged was going to cost in the region of €200,000 to develop.

One option was to put her idea out there and look for investors, but that didn’t sit well. Instead, she decided to take the much slower, bootstrapped route that involved teaching herself how to build an e-commerce marketplace from scratch.

“I wanted to understand the technology, so I started small, working on building a site using WordPress,” she says. “I gradually learned all about APIs (application programming interfaces), databases, e-commerce integrations, payments, product synchronisation and order routing. What began as learning to tweak eventually became learning how to build an entirely standalone marketplace, and there is now a significant technology platform operating behind the scenes.

“This learning process took several years, and Caboodle was only officially launched in January this year, but it means the platform has been developed from the ground up to do exactly what I wanted it to do. Global marketplaces have made discovery, checkout and delivery incredibly simple, and I wanted to replicate this for Irish retailers.

“However, unlike the very large international marketplaces, the intention is not for the individual business to disappear behind the marketplace. The businesses, founders and stories behind the products remain central to the platform.”

All of the product information displayed on Caboodle is linked to a retailer’s existing online presence, which means small businesses joining Caboodle don’t need to have a separate catalogue or e-commerce system. Caboodle acts as an additional sales channel. It doesn’t replace a retailer’s existing e-commerce infrastructure.

Caboodle has two sets of “customers”: retailers looking for another way to reach buyers and consumers who want a convenient way to buy local. The platform now hosts in excess of 2,500 products from over 60 small Irish businesses.

The company is making its money in three ways: by taking a commission on sales, by offering businesses the option of having their products promoted on the site for a monthly fee, and through its consumer membership model, which costs €12 a year and unlocks lower prices and free delivery. Over 1,000 members are now active on the site.

The platform is making money and having spent a huge amount of time building Caboodle, Flaherty is in no rush to secure outside investment. However, this may change when she starts looking at applying the Caboodle model in other markets, which is the long-term plan.

In terms of hard cash, she estimates investment to date at around €70,000 between personal funding, new business idea prize money, and State support.

“One of Caboodle’s most distinctive features is its multi-business checkout,” Flaherty says. “A customer can put products from several small Irish businesses into one Caboodle basket, complete a single checkout and pay no delivery fees. Caboodle separates and routes each part of the order to the relevant business.

“For the partner there is very little, if any, additional administration. The Caboodle order appears inside their existing online store in much the same way as an order placed through their own website, allowing them to process and fulfil it through normal workflows, with the payments automated through Stripe.”

A big issue for small businesses selling online is the cost of delivery, and Flaherty has done a deal with An Post that allows her supply partners to send orders at a preferential rate. “We are using Caboodle’s collective purchasing power to make logistics more economical for smaller businesses, and An Post has been very supportive,” she says.

Flaherty combines all of this with her full-time academic job and caring for two small children, so she deliberately structured the platform to require the minimum amount of daily input. “This is another reason it took so long,” she says. ”Any manual type of system was going to take constant updates and it would never scale to the level I wanted. The only solution was complete automation.

“I wanted the whole process to be seamless for members and easy for me to administer. We don’t hold any stock, for example. Products remain with individual businesses. Only their catalogues are synchronised with Caboodle for ordering purposes. My input now is primarily on the marketing side, promoting the platform and bringing new retailers on board.

“Building a marketplace requires patience because both sides of the network have to grow together,” Flaherty says. “It would be very easy to chase growth too quickly, but I have tried to build Caboodle slowly and credibly, make sure the technology works and learn from the businesses and members using it.

“I have had an extremely positive experience with the supports available to early-stage entrepreneurs, particularly through the Local Enterprise Office and programmes supporting female founders, but if I were to suggest one improvement it would be greater provision for companies that sit between a traditional local small business and a high-growth export start-up. Some businesses need time to prove a model domestically before their international potential becomes obvious.”