Amazon acquires Australian website building platform Selz as competition with Shopify continues

Recently, foreign media broke the news that Amazon had quietly acquired the Australian independent website building platform Selz on January 15. Martin Rushe, CEO and founder of Selz, announced the deal in his company blog in January, but it was not widely circulated until last week.

Although the specific terms of the deal are still unknown, one thing is certain: Amazon's acquisition of Selz is inseparable from the growing competitive threat from Canadian website building platform Shopify.

Amazon vs. Shopify

According to investorplace, Amazon, with a market value of $1.6 trillion, accounts for nearly 37% of the e-commerce retail market share in the United States, ranking first , but the development momentum of latecomer Shopify should not be underestimated.

Currently, Shopify has more than 1 million registered merchants in 175 countries and regions around the world. Its gross merchandise volume (GMV) in 2020 reached US$119.6 billion, and its overall market size has reached 40% of Amazon's; its e-commerce market share in the United States has also reached 5.9%, ranking second.

Faced with increasingly fierce competition from Shopify and changes in consumer shopping needs, Amazon has previously established an independent website business research team code-named "Project Santos", led by CEO Jeff Bezos himself. Therefore, the acquisition of independent website building platform Selz may be part of the "Santos" project.

Amazon previously operated a Shopify-style service called Amazon Webstore , which allowed small businesses to run online stores built on Amazon technology, but it was shut down in 2015.

According to Bloomberg, the acquisition may indicate that Amazon is seeking to transform its position in the e-commerce market and its long-standing operating methods, that is, no longer simply pursuing to get all sellers into its platform market, but working with them behind the scenes to provide consumers with a better shopping experience.

Why Selz?

According to Crunchbase, Selz was founded in Sydney seven years ago with less than 50 employees and a total financing amount of US$11 million. It can help small and medium-sized enterprises easily create their own online independent stores and provide operational support for various businesses such as online payments. Currently, the number of registered users on this independent website building platform exceeds 125,000 , but it is still far from Shopify's one million users.

Selz certainly can't compare with Shopify's market value of $169 billion and its smaller competitor BigCommerce's market value of $5 billion.

From this point of view, Amazon's acquisition of Selz may be mainly due to its website-building technology , rather than its business volume and market size. And this acquisition may just be a "cheap experiment" before Amazon makes a larger investment in the independent station field.

Faced with the threat of the DTC business model, a powerful company like Amazon has only two options: fight or accept . Obviously, Amazon's acquisition of Selz not only shows Amazon's humble learning of the independent station DTC business model, but also reflects the huge development potential of independent website building platforms such as Shopify.

The competition and contest between the independent station ecology and the platform ecology in the e-commerce industry is expected to continue. Can Amazon's "integration" of embracing both operating modes go smoothly? Let's wait and see!

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