GoDaddy to Acquire PF Poynt to Build Out Commerce Capabilities for Small Businesses

GoDaddy announced this week that it plans to acquire payment facilitator Poynt to build out its suite of commerce and payment capabilities.
The web platform provider has agreed to pay $320 million in cash and $45 in deferred cash payments in a deal that is expected to close during the first quarter of next year.
“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 in a press release.
“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.”
Poynt offers a technology platform for small businesses that includes point-of-sale hardware and software as well as payment processing services. According to the release, Poynt serves more than 100,000 merchants and handles more than $16 billion in gross merchandise volume annually.
GoDaddy plans to integrate Poynt’s capabilities into its existing commerce solution to further enable small businesses to sell goods and services across channels.
Once the deal closes, Poynt CEO Osama Bedier will report to GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani as the head of a new Commerce Division.
“Going forward, I want to assure you that Poynt will continue to support our products and partnerships. Our mission remains unchanged. We will simply have more resources to build seamless and intuitive commerce products, expand our partnerships and delight many more customers,” Bedier said in a statement.
Last year, Bedier delivered a keynote address at PaymentFacilitator’s PF WORLD conference, in which he compared integrated payments to the plumbing in a home.
“Payments have become plumbing,” Bedier told the audience. “You can’t actually deliver a great commerce experience without payments already paving the way.”