A company known for design tools and document software buys an online store engine. Why would a software company buy ecommerce platforms at all? At first glance it looks like a strange fit. Look closer at how software companies earn money and it makes sense, and understanding the logic helps merchants who find themselves on the receiving end of such deals.
Why software firms buy ecommerce platforms: the commerce gap
Many large software vendors sell tools for creating content, analyzing customers and running campaigns. They can tell a retailer who visited, which ad worked and what email to send. What they often can’t do is process the order that results. That final step, the cart, checkout, inventory and payment, sits with a different vendor, which means customer data is split across systems and the vendor sees only part of the story.
Deciding to buy ecommerce platforms closes the loop. Content, marketing, analytics and transactions can sit under one roof, and the vendor can sell a single package to a single buyer. For big retailers and brands, the promise is a unified view of the customer from the first ad to the repeat purchase.
What makes a platform attractive
- Open-source roots. A platform with a large community edition has a pool of developers, agencies and extensions around it. That ecosystem is hard to build from scratch.
- Merchant stickiness. Rebuilding an online store is expensive and risky, so customers rarely leave once they’ve invested. That produces predictable revenue.
- Enterprise upsell. A free or low-cost base tier brings in small merchants. Some of them grow, and the vendor can sell them support, hosting and advanced features.
- Data. Transaction data is among the most useful kinds for personalization and forecasting.
How deals to buy ecommerce platforms are justified
Acquirers usually talk about cross-selling: their existing customers will buy commerce features, and the commerce customers will buy marketing and analytics. In practice, cross-selling is slower than the slide decks suggest. Sales teams must learn new products, integrations take longer than planned, and buyers on the commerce side often differ from the marketing buyers who signed earlier contracts.
That doesn’t mean such deals fail. It means success is measured over years, and the early signs are things like product roadmaps, retention of key engineers and whether the community around the platform stays engaged.
It helps to picture a specific merchant. A mid-sized retailer already pays a vendor for email campaigns and site analytics. When that vendor decides to buy ecommerce platforms, the retailer might later be offered one contract covering ads, content, store and reporting. That is convenient, and it also makes switching harder, because more of the business now sits with one supplier.
Speed is part of the story. Shoppers abandon pages that load slowly, and companies that buy ecommerce platforms can tune the whole path, which is the problem examined in why checkout pages feel slow. Merchants should also watch costs, since the add-ons sold around a store often matter as much as the base price; how social media management software pricing works shows how tiers can hide the true total. Background on the business is in Wikipedia’s article on e-commerce.
What merchants should do when ownership changes
If your store runs on a platform that gets acquired, the first step is to avoid reacting hastily. Read the announcements for specifics on support commitments and pricing. Then check:
- Whether the community edition will keep being maintained, and how often security patches arrive.
- Whether your hosting arrangement, extensions and payment integrations remain supported.
- How licensing terms might change at your next renewal.
- Whether the roadmap now leans toward large enterprise customers, which can leave smaller shops feeling neglected.
Keep a record of your customizations. If you ever need to move, a well-documented store is far easier to migrate than one where nobody remembers why a certain script exists.
The developer view
Agencies and freelance developers who build on a platform should watch for changes in certification programs, partner terms and marketplace rules. After an acquisition, the commercial relationship between the platform and its ecosystem is sometimes rewritten. Sometimes that benefits partners through bigger sales channels, and sometimes it tightens margins. Diversifying across a couple of platforms keeps a small agency from being exposed to one decision made in a distant boardroom.
Reading the next one
Whenever a company decides to buy ecommerce platforms or anything else outside its usual territory, ask what gap it fills in the customer journey, whether the product comes with a living community, and how quickly the buyer can integrate it without breaking what customers already rely on. Those three questions tell you more than the price tag does. And if you’re a merchant, the best preparation is dull: backups, documentation and a clear idea of what switching would cost.
A note on timing
Integration work after companies buy ecommerce platforms usually takes longer than the announcement implies. Product teams must be merged, billing systems aligned and support processes combined, and each step can disrupt customers if handled badly. Merchants who ask their account manager for a written timeline tend to get clearer answers than those who rely on blog posts. Plan any major redesign of your own store around that timeline, not ahead of it.
Image: San José Public Library / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.
