US e-commerce giant Amazon continues to further its campaign of aggressive expansion, including new adding ways for businesses to sell their goods on its platform. With this goal in mind, Shopify competitor Selz has become the latest to be acquired by Jeff Bezos’ led company.
Sydney-based Selz is an e-commerce platform that aids small businesses in creating their own websites and launching their own online stores. While the details of the acquisition were not specified, it was announced in a blog post that Selz had been acquired by Amazon on January 15.
“We have signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon and are looking forward to working with them as we continue to build easy-to-use tools for entrepreneurs. Nothing is changing for our customers at this time, and we’ll be in touch with customers as and when we have further updates,” Martin Rushe, CEO, and founder of Selz said in a blog post. Amazon confirmed the acquisition.
This acquisition hints at Amazon’s interest in letting small businesses use their own websites rather than trying to direct all their traffic to its marketplace, where merchants pay commissions on each sale as well as delivery fees. This comes after Bezos had recognized Shopify, an e-commerce enabler that witnessed an unprecedented surge in business in 2020 due to the pandemic, as a rival and competitor since consumers turned to online retailers for both essential and non-essential goods post-March 2020. Amazon had once operated Amazon Webstore, which allowed small businesses to run online stores built on Amazon’s technology, but it was shut down in 2015.
The acquisition comes after Amazon Marketplace, an e-commerce platform owned and operated by Amazon that enables third-party sellers to sell new or used products on a fixed-price, continues to thrive and has accounted for more than half of Amazon’s sales during the winter quarter that witnessed a record amount of revenue being brought in.
The Selz acquisition could give Amazon the impetus it needs to put the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce behind, providing tools for small and medium-sized industries to hasten their online operations.
