The Long Term Irony of Amazon Acquiring Selz
More commentary on Amazon acquisition of Selz to enter the eCommerce battle.
The solution was built in Australia. Which I find interesting. Likely means it is built with more international concerns than Shopify originally was. For example in India, Shopify is still widely viewed as a toy - most people use Magento for cost reasons. This means a native cloud solution has a market opportunity. Who else was founded in Australia? BigCommerce. Something in the water, mate?
Selz has a "Selz Pay" solution. This sounds even similar to Shop Pay ;-). They also support PayPal and Stripe. Likely Selz Pay is built on Stripe.
Selz has an App Store, although nascent....
Selz's themes use Liquid for its themes, a nod to Mr. Lutke who invented the technology.
This is all starting to sound familiar...Selz taking a lot of the Shopify playbook. I did note that Selz had native support for developing courses and digital products which is a little unique for a platform early in its history, and it has buttons to integrate with WordPress and other platforms too.
Nathan Lowenthal added this interesting take: “In international acquisitions, Amazon has seemingly always looked to find quick ways to scale outside of its core-competencies. They clearly see the opportunity in Australia, but need ways to onboard more combo D2C and 3rd party platform sellers, at scale. In the USA/North America, Shopify is often the low-pain-point entry-point. Now Amazon can themselves own that digital solution, while integrating that solution closely.”
Amazon doesn't often think in terms of months, instead it thinks in terms of years. Meaning, if we do nothing in 5 to 10 years, what could happen to us? If we choose another path, what is possible for us to build in the market over that same time? What actions would we need to take to create that outcome, and what would need to be true? I think it will be a slow burn personally, mostly because these markets take 3-5 years to move. It's also possible that Amazon will just become one of many storefronts that a merchant needs to create to do business. i.e. if you are on Amazon and have a business account, they could make it a default part of the setup.
Amazon doesn't enter any market that it doesn't eventually plan to scale and win. And it could take some time to play out.
