Shopify has acquired Waterloo-based Boltmade, the company announced, bringing the digital consulting and product development firm in-house. The acquisition will add Boltmade’s 21-person team, which mostly consists of engineers and designers, to its operations in Waterloo, focusing on Shopify Plus.
Shopify Plus is the e-commerce provider’s “white glove” offering, with additional features including dedicated account management personnel, a customizable checkout process and discounts on other add-on service offerings offered by Shopify. The offering is meant to target larger merchants operating on the platform, and those that do a fairly high volume business. Current Plus customers include Reddit, Wikipedia, Tesla and the WWF, among others.
Boltmade designs and builds software for client companies, a list which includes Xerox’s Parc, Shopify itself, Kik and others. The acquisition adds to Shopify’s existing Plus presence in Waterloo, which a recent article described as “primarily a sales team,” and should add considerable technical talent to address Plus customer needs.
The acquisition has more than a passing resemblance to Shopify’s 2013 acquisition of Toronto user experience and design agency Jet Cooper, which ended up bringing a lot of the e-commerce player’s current top Toronto talent onboard. Shopify did not disclose the terms of the deal.