GoDaddy Acquires Poynt to Enhance E-Commerce Payments

Need to Know

• GoDaddy will purchase Poynt, a payments processor, for $320 million in cash at closing, plus $45 million in deferred cash payments.
• Poynt will be integrated into GoDaddy’s websites and marketing, as well as its WordPress commerce services, so businesses can use it to facilitate commerce across various channels.
• Poynt is used by more than 100,000 merchants and has more than $16 billion in annual gross merchandising volume.

Analysis

GoDaddy, the domain registration and hosting company, has purchased payments processing company Poynt, in an effort to diversify its e-commerce offerings for small- to medium-sized businesses.

According a press release published December 15, GoDaddy will pay $320 million in cash at closing, in addition to $45 million in deferred cash payments over three years for Poynt. The deal is expected to close in early 2021.

“Commerce is critical to our customers and we continue to invest in building seamlessly intuitive experiences that enable small businesses to sell everywhere,” GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani said of the deal. “Poynt accelerates our strategy to provide a complete suite of commerce and payment services to address this critical customer need and focus on a large addressable market opportunity. We’ve built leading e-commerce capabilities that today allow small businesses to easily sell on their sites, across major marketplaces and the most popular social networks, and now we will help make them successful everywhere.”

With the Poynt acquisition, GoDaddy is hoping to enable small businesses that use its web-hosting services to boost sales, by integrating online and offline shopping experiences. Poynt’s software encompasses terminals, mobile, and web software, and it will be integrated with GoDaddy’s websites, marketing, and WordPress commerce services, making it an ideal solution for businesses looking to connect their various channels. Poynt is currently used by more than 100,000 merchants and has more than $16 billion in annual gross merchandising volume

“Poynt has spent the past seven years building the most advanced connected commerce platform on the market,” said Poynt CEO Osama Bedier. “Our team is super excited to join forces and help millions of GoDaddy entrepreneurs sell everywhere, in the most seamless experience possible, at a time they couldn’t need it more.”

This is not the first big acquisition for GoDaddy this year. In September, GoDaddy announced that it had acquired SkyVerge, a leading WooCommerce product developer. WooCommerce is an open-source e-comm platform plugin for WordPress; GoDaddy’s acquisition of SkyVerge positioned the company as a strong player in an e-commerce field that has grown increasingly competitive in the wake of COVID-19.

The GoDaddy-Poynt deal is part of a larger trend that has seen hosting domains diversifying their payment processing and other financial offerings, in an effort to accommodate a spike in e-comm brought on by the pandemic. Earlier this month, for instance, Payments processor Stripe announced that it would be offering banking-as-a-service tools, partnering with e-commerce platforms—such as Shopify—to offer checking accounts to vendors and merchants.