As a sign of continued industry consolidation, Bigcommerce, an emerging e-commerce platform player, announced its first acquisition: Austin-based startup Zing. Atlanta-based rival ShopVisible was acquired by tetail technology giant Epicor in December 2014.
Since its 2009 founding, Bigcommerce has raised $125 million, with its most recent $40 million round from Steve Case’s Revolution Growth Fund in 2014. This acquisition announcement comes on the heels of news that Bigcommerce’s main competitor, Shopify, has filed for an IPO. The value of the acquisition deal was not made public, but five employees from Zing will be joining the team at Bigcommerce. The two companies share a common mission of simplifying commerce, especially for small business owners who may be intimidated by the thought of selling online.
Zing launched in 2013 and integrated with Bigcommerce’s API shortly thereafter. Zing also offers integrations with Mailchimp and QuickBooks, part of its mission to simplify running a virtual store. The Zing platform includes a point of sale (POS) system for easy checkout, as well as back office tools for managing inventory and viewing reports. It will continue to operate as a stand-alone product following the merger, but Bigcommerce will be foregoing the use of Zing’s POS system in favor of partnerships with established POS partners like Square, NCR Silver, and Lightspeed. In addition to those deals, Bigcommerce also completed integration with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Intuit this year. Following the acquisition, Bigcommerce will make an expanded set of APIs and technologies available to those partners leveraging Zing’s intellectual property.
Bigcommerce has 85,000 customers, some 30 percent of which also operate at least one brick and mortar store. With the acquisition of Zing, Bigcommerce will be able to deliver omnichannel solutions to those customers, including next generation online-to-offline services like ship from store and in-store pickup options, more quickly than if it had built those tools independently.
In a news release announcing the deal, Nate Stewart, co-founder and CEO of Zing, said:
Since the company’s inception, our mission at Zing has been to help business owners sell more effectively through products that simplify and streamline how they manage their retail operations, both online and in store. There is no better embodiment of that mission than Bigcommerce, and we’re thrilled to bring our expertise to a company that has proven itself to be the most flexible and scalable platform for emerging brands to grow their business.
Bigcommerce has more than 350 employees and offices in Sydney, Australia; Austin, Texas; and San Francisco, California.
Photo Credit: Image by Frank BLAIS via Flickr under CC 2.0
