MailChimp partners with Square to let its users create landing pages with built-in e-commerce features, says 50% of its revenue now comes from e-commerce
Mailchimp, the popular email newsletter service and marketing platform, today announced a partnership with Square that will allow … Tweets: @alex Tweets: in SF alex / @alex : Like @yoda said, that percentage is way higher than I would have guessed. Like 5x. Shows what I know! http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
MailChimp has been walking this path for a while: in early 2017 it launched a Facebook ad campaign builder inside its dashboard as its e-commerce customer base grew 46% year over year, and today's Square partnership extends the same logic from advertising into selling itself — landing pages with checkout baked in. The disclosed figure that half of MailChimp's revenue now comes from e-commerce reframes the company from newsletter tool to commerce platform.
For Square, this is the mirror image of moves it has made before: in 2015 it shipped email marketing tools for brick-and-mortar sellers, and in 2016 it let merchants buy Facebook ads tied to actual sales data. Partnering with MailChimp puts Square's payment rails inside another platform's workflow rather than building the audience tools itself.
First-order effects
- MailChimp users can now spin up landing pages that take payments without leaving the platform, deepening lock-in for the e-commerce merchants who already drive 50% of its revenue.
- Square gets distribution to MailChimp's large merchant base without acquiring it, extending its payment volume beyond its own point-of-sale footprint.
Second-order effects
- Commerce platforms competing for the same small-business seller face pressure to match the bundled marketing-plus-payments stack; MailChimp's later acqui-hire of LemonStand, a Shopify competitor that was shutting down shows how quickly it kept buying storefront capability after this partnership.
- Payment processors and marketing-software vendors increasingly need each other's surface area, pushing deal-making toward whoever owns the merchant's daily workflow rather than the single-function tool.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the email/marketing layer and the payments layer consolidate into all-in-one merchant operating systems, where standalone newsletter tools and standalone payment buttons get squeezed between integrated suites.
- Revenue attribution shifts toward platforms that can close the loop from campaign to transaction — the same linkage Square pursued with its Facebook ad integration — making closed-loop commerce data the moat rather than any single feature.
The trend: Marketing platforms are absorbing payments and storefront functions to become full-stack merchant platforms, with workflow ownership deciding who captures the transaction economics.