SEOshop acquired, becomes Lightspeed eCom

Lightspeed POS, a point-of-sale platform for retailers and restaurants, today announced the acquisition of Dutch ecommerce software company SEOshop. As part of this acquisition, Lightspeed launches its new ecommerce platform, called Lightspeed eCom.

“This is an enormous step in the evolution of our company”, Lightspeed‘s CEO Dax Dasilva says about the acquisition. “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. But with the industry rapidly digitizing, online-only merchant demand has grown exponentially”, he says. “Bringing SEOshop into the Lightspeed family gives us additional global scale, and allows us to help store owners create a great shopping experience and sell smarter- all from an iPad- no matter how their customers choose to shop.”

Lightspeed eCom
We spoke with Ruud Stelder, CEO and founder of SEOshop, and he says Lightspeed will blend SEOshop’s software into its own ecommerce platform and integrate this with its cloud-based POS solution. This way multi-channel retailers have more tools to run their entire business from one place. It’s the first time Lightspeed also offers a service for online-only merchants.

According to the press release, SEOshop is Europe’s fastest growing ecommerce platform with 1900 percent growth over the past five years. The Dutch service providers serves more than 8,000 online merchants, including some big names like Philips Lighting, National Geographic Netherlands and the Van Gogh Museum. These clients automatically become Lightspeed eCom customers.

As part of the deal, SEOshop’s CEO Ruud Stelder will join the Lightspeed leadership team as Director of Global eCommerce Revenue, and the Dutch company’s CTO Dennis Cuijpers will become Lightspeed’s Director of eCommerce Development and Architecture.

Lightspeed eCom is now shipping in Europe and an initital preview is available directly in the US and Canada. The full version of the new ecommerce software solution as well as the integration with Lightspeed Retail for British customers is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2016.