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Global e-commerce giant Amazon is taking its fight to Shopify with the acquisition of Australian startup Selz, a company that helps businesses and entrepreneurs around the world boost their online sales. 
Co-founder and CEO Martin Rushe (pictured right) published the news on Selz's blog page last month, but the story was picked up by international news outlets overnight and Amazon confirmed the deal with Geekwire.
"We have signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon and are looking forward to working with them as we continue to build easy-to-use tools for entrepreneurs," Rushe wrote.
"Nothing is changing for our customers at this time, and we'll be in touch with customers as and when we have further updates."
The company was co-founded almost eight years ago by Rushe and its CTO Mathieu Kempe, and according to Crunchbase.com it undertook two Series A funding rounds in 2016 and 2019, worth $5 million each.
It is a move that is widely seen as Amazon's attempt to muscle in on Canadian e-commerce platform builder Shopify, which over the course of the pandemic has seen its sales surge as businesses take online sales into it their own hands.
Selz has not confirmed the transaction value of the Amazon deal, and is yet to respond to requests for comment at the time of writing.
The company - based in Sydney and with another operation in the Philippines - provides a wide range of management services for e-commerce, ranging from inventory management to shipping integration to invoicing to customer growth insights.
Its products also include an online store builder, as well as several marketing and e-commerce development tools.
"Our mission is to give growing businesses access to the powerful tools used by big business but to do it in a way that is time-efficient, simple to use and easy to expand," the company states on its page.
"We also believe that modern selling is multi-channel. Our service enables our customers to sell on the web, on mobile, via social and via marketplaces, and manage all their sales, payments, returns, promotions and fulfillment being managed from one simple place."
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