On April 26, 2018, the company Square announced that they’ve reached an agreement to acquire Weebly for $365 million in cash and stock. The announcement seemed odd for a payment provider company to acquire a website builder company.

Other Square Acquisitions

If you never knew, Square has been exploring other areas such as Caviar which is a food delivery service and Zesty which is a food catering service. Both of these companies have also been acquired in 2014 and 2018.

When Weebly was acquired, its competitor Squarespace had raised $200 million at a $1.7 billion dollar valuation at the end of 2017.

Square believes that buying Weebly can create “one cohesive solution” for entrepreneurs looking to build an online and offline business. Weebly has 40 percent of its paid customers outside of the U.S. which helps Square expand its brand globally.

Square Weebly

With all of that said, how does this acquisition affect Weebly one year later? The website builder is still regarded as one of the easiest website builders to use. It’s not as flexible as Wix and it’s not as sophisticated as Squarespace, but Weebly might have an advantage over its competition when it comes to e-commerce features. This particular website builder can provide you many e-commerce features such as selling gift cards, adding customer accounts, deal with abandoned shopping cart details, and it has an in-store pickup feature. There are even more e-commerce features that can help your e-commerce business. Weebly is the only website builder that makes e-commerce easy to use. Weebly has been building its e-commerce features aggressively since being acquired from Square.

Weebly has a substantial amount of subscribers at 625,000. Merchant payment processor Square acquired Weebly for $365 million. Square intends on global expansion via this acquisition. A great portion of Weebly users lie outside of the United States, allowing Square to address a bigger audience of entrepreneurs. Revenues are expected to rise from $744 MM to $764 MM. The team members are also included in the merger. Most of the team from Weebly will be joining forces with the Square team.

The merger occurred during late April 2018. The merger is slated to help businesses all over the world. The services of both companies will line up well together. The CFO of Square stated that she feels both companies are culturally aligned. Backers of the acquisition include Floodgate, Sequoia Capital, Tencent, Felicis Ventures, and Y Combinator.