Bigcommerce Buys Fellow Austin Tech Firm Zing
Bigcommerce, a company that builds Web stores for small- and medium-sized businesses, is acquiring an Austin, TX-based business, Zing, that helps retailers manage their business between online and offline.
Terms of the deal were not released.
Bigcommerce counts about 85,000 retailers worldwide as its customers, up from 55,000 in November. The company is buying Zing so that it can use Zing’s tools for software applications and various retail technologies with other point-of-sale systems, such as Square, Lightspeed and NCR Silver, that Bigcommerce works with. Zing had previously also operated a point-of-sale system.
Zing’s products allow users to sync inventory between online and physical stores in real time, and offer services such as in-store pickup, dynamic order management, and integrated customer data and reporting, according to Bigcommerce, which has offices in Austin, San Francisco, and Sydney. Zing’s technology will let retailers who work with Bigcommerce pick the point-of-sale (POS) system that best fits their business, says Bigcommerce chief product officer Tim Schultz.
“As we approach POS vendors with this narrative, they’re like yes, we don’t want to build this online stuff that’s really complicated,” said Schultz, who was hired away from Google last year.
Zing has worked with Bigcommerce since the early stages of its API (application program interface) development and had planned to use its technology, much of which was built with Bigcommerce in mind, with only its point-of-sale system, according to Zing CEO Nate Stewart. The company has also been adding the ability to use tools, such as e-mail marketing service MailChimp, into its system.
“It’s really just joining up and taking our technology and vision and implementing it with Lightspeed and all the other great point of sales out there,” Stewart says. “This really is a natural extension of what we wanted to build, it’s just now we get to do it with all these other market leaders that we couldn’t before.”
Bigcommerce has raised $ 125 million as a startup from investors including SoftBank Capital, American Express, Telstra Ventures, General Catalyst, and Steve Case’s Revolution Growth. It received $ 40 million from Revolution Growth last year.
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