Mobile point-of-sale provider Lightspeed has acquired European e-commerce company SEOshop and relaunched its online retail platform as Lightspeed eCom.
Lightspeed, a Montreal-based competitor to Square and Shopify, provides a mobile register and payment processing service for retailers and restaurants. Its multilingual, multicurrency platform has seen success both in both North America and Europe. In September, it raised US$61 million in Series C funding led by Caisse de depot and Investissement Quebec, bringing the total of all investments made in the company to US$126 million.
SEOshop, based in Amsterdam, is a rapidly growing online store platform serving 8,000 merchants in Europe. It offers about 100 templates for online storefronts in 14 languages, as well as online inventory management, SEO optimization and content publishing.
As Lightspeed eCom, SEOshop’s toolset will eventually be integrated with Lightspeed POS, so merchants can manage sales and inventory across both online and brick-and-mortar operations. Until now, Lightspeed has offered some e-commerce tools to merchants that want to set up an online store, but hasn’t offered a standalone e-commerce product.
Along with its platform and 80 employees, Lightspeed will acquire SEOshop’s European business, including clients like Philips Lighting, Heineken and the Van Gogh Museum. The buyout brings its collective userbase to 34,000 merchants in more than 100 countries. The company estimates that merchants will process US$12 billion in annual transactions between Lightspeed POS and Lightspeed eCom. (For comparison, Square, which raised $243 million in an IPO last week, processed about US$24 billion last year.)
“We set out to help independent retailers grow and thrive by giving them a POS with the same back-office tools used by big retail in a user-friendly, mobile package,” said Dax Dasilva, Lightspeed’s CEO, in a release. “With the industry rapidly digitizing, online-only merchant demand has grown exponentially. Bringing SEOshop into the Lightspeed family gives us additional scale, and allows us to help store owners create a global shopping experience and sell smarter — all from an iPad — no matter how their customers choose to shop.”
The new e-commerce platform is currently available in Europe and will be introduced in North America in Q1 2016.
