Shopify, the cloud-based, multichannel commerce platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses, announced on Monday (Oct. 3) it has acquired privately held Boltmade, a product design and development consultancy based in Waterloo, Ontario. The acquisition of Boltmade will help accelerate the development of the Shopify Plus product offering. Shopify Plus offers high-growth, high-volume merchants a cloud-based, fully hosted enterprise commerce platform, without the limitations of legacy solutions. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
“We first worked with the Boltmade team in early 2016 and quickly realized the team’s huge potential and depth of talent,” said Loren Padelford, VP of Shopify Plus, said in a press release announcing the deal. “Shopify is committed to investing in talent. The acquisition of Boltmade will bring a strong group of designers and engineers to Shopify Plus. We’re thrilled to have them join our team to help shape the future of commerce for larger merchants.”
Founded in 2013, Boltmade is a 21-person product-focused digital consulting firm that designs and builds software products for clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. The Boltmade team will join the Shopify Plus office in Waterloo. “Shopify has had a big impact on commerce by helping businesses of all sizes achieve success. Earlier this year, we jumped at the chance to work on a project with them,” said Jim Murphy, founder and president of Boltmade, also in the press release. “We’re excited to be joining Shopify Plus to help some of the most recognizable, fastest-growing brands in the world sell billions of dollars of product.”
The acquisition comes at a time when Shopify has been benefiting from its relationship with Amazon, which it inked in Sept. 2015. According to a media report this past spring, Shopify was on pace to reach revenue of between $337 million and $347 million — 5.2 percent higher than its previous estimate — and key to that expansion is Shopify’s relationship with Amazon. Since first partnering with the eCommerce giant in Sept. 2015 (when Shopify helped Amazon sellers transition off of the site’s now-defunct web store), the continued relationship through which Shopify clients have the option of making sales through Amazon has reportedly played a large part in Shopify’s revenue growth.
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