Months after acquiring Dutch startup SEOShop, Lightspeed announces their first lovechild

After Canadian cloud-based point of sale retail innovator (what a mouthful) Lightspeed purchased Dutch startup success story SEOshop last November, the company has now revealed what their joint future will look like. Lightspeed CEO Dax Dasilva and SEOShop founder Ruud Stelder, now head of the European head office in Amsterdam, revealed their new “lovechild”: Omnichannel. Like proud parents, they announced the arrival of this brand new product, which has sprung from their merger roughly nine months after the acquisition. 

“Holy Grail for retailers”

Needless to say the chiefs of the cloud-based company are on cloud nine right now. The Lightspeed-leaders are bullish about the potential of their Omnichannel, which is a blend of SEOshop’s online focused retail software and Lightspeed’s offline focused payment software. Dasilva describes it as no less than “Kind of the Holy Grail for retailers”. Stelder adds a few bold statements as well: “By combining the online expertise that SEOshop has and the offline expertise that Lightspeed has, you really have the best of both worlds. With Lightspeed we deliver a product that is absolutely unbeatable for any Dutch company right now.”

Blended experience of online and in-store

Dasilva describes the new product as the culmination of what Lightspeed has been working on for years: “Omnichannel was only possible as a combination of Lightspeed and SEOshop. This combined product gives retail merchants ability to blend online and instore channels in a very powerful way”, the Lightspeed-leader explains. The company already had in mind what they wanted to do next. Dasilva was looking for companies that could help to deliver the next step in Lightspeed’s evolution: “We had many products, but it wasn’t enough for what our customers wanted to do online. They wanted a very blended experience of online and in-store. That’s when we found SEOshop.”

Scalable Product

Dasilva explains the decision to buy SEOshop was a no-brainer for Lightspeed: “We couldn’t build Omnichannel in-house unless we had five years, but the world doesn’t wait for you for that long. That’s why we merged. We looked at fifty different companies and we bought SEOshop because they are multi-language and multi-currency. These are attributes that our customers were looking for. SEOshop’s product is also very scalable”.

Big Plans for European head office in Amsterdam

All too often entrepreneurs get restless when they are “on the payroll” again during their lock-out period. SEOshop-founder Stelder explains why he won’t have to worry about getting bored anytime soon: “The Amsterdam office is becoming the head office of Europe, with global responsibilities. In the past my colleagues called me “Chief Everything Officer” and that is still the case. We have been growing so fast we have outgrown the office. We are now moving into the former PvdA office on the Herengracht (the Dutch labor party recently announced they were vacating the posh canal belt office as the high rent was contrary to the party’s values, ed.). Omnichannel is absolutely the launch to get more market penetration than we have right now. We have big plans for Europe.”

Photo: Ruud Stelder (l) and Dax Dasilva (r). Photo by Sjors Oostdam