Bigcommerce Might Be Closing In On First Acquisition

Having raised a good amount of funding for itself, it appears that Bigcommerce might be looking to spend some of that money to buy a startup.

Sources have told Re/Code that the Austin-based eCommerce software company is close to announcing its acquisition of Zing, which makes checkout software and inventory management tools for brick-and-mortar businesses.

As of April 26, the outlet could not confirm terms of the alleged deal, nor would any Bigcommerce spokesperson or Zing CEO Nate Stewart speak of it on the record.

Nevertheless, Re/Code seems confident in its sources, and not without reason. As the report points out, Bigcommerce has over the past year entered into partnerships with companies such as Square and Lightspeed POS to outfit brick-and-mortar retail stores with Bigcommerce software. And given that one of the desired aspects of these partnerships is to allow businesses to track inventory and customer data online and offline in real time, an acquisition of Zing — whose technology can be applied to such a task — would make sense for Bigcommerce.

Zing is actually among the companies that Bigcommerce has partnered with in the past, Re/Code notes, to offer Bigcommerce software to physical retail locations that had worked with the startup. The sources who shared the information about Bigcommerce allegedly purchasing Zing also told Re/Code that Zing’s checkout software business will be discontinued as a result of the acquisition, because Bigcommerce reportedly would prefer to curate its existing relationships with more established point-of-sale software producers.

Another factor supporting the likelihood that Bigcommerce would make a move like the Zing pickup is that the company is in an expansion race with is primary competitor, Shopify, which recently filed for an IPO.