MailChimp and Shopify decided to part ways about a week ago due to differences with regards to how they shared their customer data in their respective applications. Before this took place, MailChimp quietly acqui-hired Shopify’s fellow competitor LemonStand for their services.
Read on to know more about what this acquisition-hire means for MailChimp and LemonStand.
What is LemonStand?
LemonStand was a former e-commerce company based out of Vancouver, Canada. The company developed cloud-based computer software that was made available to online retailers. It is one of Shopify’s smaller competitors.
What is MailChimp?
MailChimp is a platform that provides e-mail marketing services. It is a marketing automation platform based out of Atlanta, Georgia, US. The company helps businesses grow by providing various services such as advertising, e-mail marketing, landing pages and other automation tools.
MailChimp has been slowly building its revenue stream in e-commerce. It integrates many other features into its platform that will allow its customers to sell items as a part of their marketing strategy. For example, they can offer sale items as a part of a company’s promotional campaign.
The Acqui-Hire of LemonStand
When asked, Mailchimp confirmed the deal between Mailchimp and LemonStand. They described it as an acqui-hire. The LemonStand team will now work on MailChimp’s light e-commerce functionality. The hiring of the team behind LemonStand was done at the end of February itself. No financial terms were disclosed.
Mailchimp said that the acquisition was made in order to create more features to the platform’s customers, especially when it came to those in e-commerce. They claim that their main aim is to help small businesses grow, and when it comes to e-commerce, their customers had been asking the company to add more functions that can be used to the Mailchimp platform. This would be done to help the e-commerce companies improve their marketing process and make it more efficient, and the LemonStand team would help Mailchimp achieve this goal.
The Future of Mailchimp
As per Mailchimp’s claims, the LemonStand deal is not related to the ending of their agreement with Shopify, but even then the acquisition of LemonStand is a pretty obvious indicator of the growing role of Mailchimp’s venture into e-commerce.
The main function that Mailchimp provides is email marketing and other marketing services to businesses across industries. Over time, the company has slowly been building a separate revenue stream in the e-commerce sector by integrating a number of their features into its platform that will help its customers maybe sell items to boost their marketing process. This is not to create a full fledged e-commerce platform, but to offer a one-off sale list of items as a part of a marketing campaign.
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“We believe small businesses are best served when they can choose which technology they use to run their businesses, which is why we integrate with more than 150 different apps and platforms including e-commerce platforms,” Mailchimp said in its statement.
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