Amazon Acquiring Online Commerce Platform Selz?

Australian-based online commerce platform Selz is showing a banner saying “Thank you for your interest in Selz, but we are not taking new sign-ups at this time.” We also heard from an industry source that something was potentially up with Selz and Amazon, so we did some digging.

While we couldn’t find an official announcement by Amazon of this acquisition, there is a note posted by Martin Rushe, CEO and founder of Selz on the company’s announcements board allegedly posted about one month ago saying the company is being acquired by Amazon.

“We have signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon and are looking forward to working with them as we continue to build easy-to-use tools for entrepreneurs. Nothing is changing for our customers at this time, and we’ll be in touch with customers as and when we have further updates.”

Martin Rushe, CEO and founder of Selz

In December, we reported a story, originally published by Business Insiders, that Jeff Bezos had shown again interest to build a Shopify competitor but the idea was not necessarily embraced by all executives as the company at one time operated a business called Amazon Webstore, but shut it down in 2015.

If Amazon is indeed acquiring Selz, it could become the foundation to build a Shopify competitor by Amazon under a different brand name. How did people miss this? It seems this should’ve been big news considering Bezos’ interest to build a competitor and being concerned about Shopify.

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