Throughout 2020, you could see how the Big W of WordPress hosting companies (Automattic, GoDaddy, WP Engine, Bluehost, etc.) have slowly made their 2021 market intensions visible to the world. It’s hard to hide acquisitions, mostly because all those involved want to make some noise about it. The latest acquisition is Poynt courtesy of GoDaddy. This is a good sized deal, coming in at $365 million, GoDaddy Acquires Poynt, Expands Commerce Services with Offline Sales and Integrated Payments: “Under the terms of the agreement, GoDaddy will pay $320 million in cash at closing and $45 million in deferred cash payments subject to certain performance and employment conditions over three years. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021, subject to the satisfaction of regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.”

GoDaddy and Automattic have been the most active over the course of 2020. Both have been locking up ecommerce email marketing solutions, and payment processors. This should be no surprise given the immense growth of Shopify over the course of the year. According to W3Techs, Shopify currently runs 3.2% of all websites, which is a tiny but significant fraction of WordPress and WooCommerce combined market penetration. Importantly its growth almost doubled year-over-year! This isn’t necessarily because Shopify has done something magical, it’s the solution that’s ready for a new and very diversified ecommerce world. The WordPress world is playing catch-up and only the major hosting companies can level the field.