Bolt has the chance to give the ability to purchase something at the point of discovery from digital content a one-click treatment. The company made its first acquisition on Monday, a Swedish technology company that allows direct checkout on any digital surface.
Bolt raised $400 million in Series D funding in October, bringing the total capital raised to $600 million. Ryan Breslow, the founder and CEO of Bolt, told the website that the deal had been in the works for a while.
Consumers can purchase products from sites like online publications, mobile marketplaces, price comparison sites, social media platforms or search engines with Tipser's technology. Marcus Jacobsson is the co-founder and CEO of the company.
When Bolt first began talking to Tipser, the company was not in a place to sell, but the two companies ended up going into deeper conversations and found their cultural resonances worked better together.
He said that they saw how significant Tipser could be for Bolt. They were the only formidable player because they had mastered their embedded commerce technology for a decade. They were stronger than us in some areas. It is very important to have them on our team.
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The acquisition was just shy of $200 million, according to Breslow, but no exact transaction figures were disclosed. Bolt will be adding 100 more people because the entire Tipser team is staying put. Bolt recently announced it would be expanding into Europe and Tipser will now serve as the company's European headquarters.
Bolt is launching a tool called Remote Checkout that will allow shoppers to make a purchase from the exact point of discovery. Instead of looking for reviews on social media, shoppers go to another website to make the purchase.
Bolt was working on a tool that was inspired by the popular photo-sharing app, and that you can check out directly from the app, according to Breslow.
With the death of tracking and cookies, we could see the need for native checkout. Consumers don't have to click a million things.
Bolt's Remote Checkout features include direct one-click checkout, engagement with Bolt's network of shoppers, and the ability for merchants to boost conversion rates while receiving orders through multiple channels and building direct relationships with visitors. It turns anonymous visitors into account holders and makes money from traffic on-site.
The added feature of publishers and creators being able to monetize traffic coming to their sites was something that was particularly interesting to the president of BDG. BDG has brands such as Bustle, EliteDaily and Fatherly.
He was not involved in the merger, but he was the first publisher in the US to use Tipser.
He said that he was excited about the acquisition because it would allow him to accelerate the onboarding of hundreds of more merchants onto his platform. This is a marriage of two things.
People thought that shopping directly from a magazine page with aQR codes would take off, but it didn't.
He noted that Goop was one of the few publishers who could crack the code. With these new technologies, any publisher or creator can close the gap between the upper and lower funnels and drive awareness because their commerce is shoppable and one click away.
BDG has a project with Tipser still in the early stages, but there are plans to roll out the technology on all of its sites next year. The company already had its audience engage in over 25 million sessions with people, on average, seeing 10 products per session, a metric that means the process is working.
He said that with hundreds more merchants for editors to write about, that is a game-changer.
Checkout is the most important part of B2B e- commerce.
