Square acquires website builder Weebly in $365M cash and stock deal, says it will give small business customers a way to easily build sites and online stores
- Square announced an agreement on Thursday to buy website-building company Weebly for $365 million.
Context & Ripple Effects
Square built its franchise on payments hardware and lending — its Square Capital arm had already advanced over $500 million to small businesses in 18 months by mid-2015 (over $500 million in advances) — but it sold no storefront of its own. The Weebly deal closes that gap: for $365 million in cash and stock, Square gets a site builder it can wire directly into its payment rails.
The move lands in a market already consolidating around the same thesis that small businesses want one vendor for web presence plus money movement. Squarespace was growing revenue 50% a year at a $1.7B valuation on General Atlantic's investment ($1.7B valuation), and Web.com had paid $342 million for SMB marketer Yodle before selling itself outright to private equity weeks after Square's announcement (Web.com's $1.24B sale to Siris Capital).
First-order effects
- Weebly's existing merchants gain native access to Square's payment processing and capital products, while Square's seller base gains a self-serve way to launch an online store without leaving the platform.
Second-order effects
- Squarespace and Wix now face a competitor that can bundle payments, lending, and point-of-sale with the website at effectively zero marginal cost, pressuring their standalone subscription pricing; Web.com's exit to private equity shortly after signals incumbents saw the standalone model eroding.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the SMB commerce stack consolidates into all-in-one platforms where software is priced as a loss leader for financial services — the sequence Squarespace itself followed later with its Acuity Scheduling and Tock acquisitions (Tock acquisition).
The trend: Small-business web presence is being absorbed into payments-and-lending platforms through acquisition, turning website builders into distribution channels for financial services.