Going head on with Shopify, Amazon buys Selz

Amazon has acquired Selz, a 7-year-old Australian ecommerce startup that helps entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses sell products on the website. The deal signals Amazon’s next step towards competing with Shopify and BigCommerce in the ecommerce sector.

The acquisition, which went unnoticed, recently surfaced in a company blog post on Twitter by Selz CEO and founder Martin Rushe.

In the blog post, Rushe wrote Selz has signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon and are looking forward to working with them as they 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.”

Selz, founded in Sydney, employs less than 50 people with total funding at USD11 million. It is one of many online services that provides technology to help small businesses operate ecommerce sites and payments.

However, it is a market dominated by Canadian-based Shopify, which has seen its stock surge during the pandemic. Its revenues up to USD767 million in the third quarter of 2020, up 96%, and its market capitalisation is now approximately USD177 billion.

This has quickened the tech giant’s interest to go head on against Shopify.

Although Shopify and Amazon are different but, in many ways, they are competitors as both cater to small businesses and online merchants. Merchants on Amazon must sell through the Amazon marketplace directly, while merchants on Shopify manage their online stores independently.

Amazon has previously run a Shopify-like service called Webstore but was shut down in 2015. Since then, Jeff Bezos has been searching for a service platform that caters to small businesses.