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Yahoo made a move toward the small-business sector July 31 by acquiring four-year-old Web services provider Lexity, founded by one of its former employees, Amit Kumar. Terms of the transaction were not released.
When the deal closes, Lexity will become the 19th company acquired by Yahoo since Marissa Mayer became CEO a year ago.
Lexity is an all-purpose portal for small businesses that provides a menu of free and premium services, including real-time analytics and customer-relationship tracking. It allows companies to obtain and store insights into various markets, as well as identify historical trends for a business’s store traffic.
For example, Lexity Live offers free real-time visitor tracking, analytics and insights for e-commerce. Users can add sales insights for a monthly fee. Lexity also offers connections to the Facebook Live store and the Google Shopping store for $19 per month each.
Other services now available include eCommHub ($35 per month), IncentiVibe ($20 per month and up), Justuno ($15 per month and up) and about 12 more. Some 30 more are in the works.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company claims it serves tens of thousands of customers across 114 countries.
“Four years ago (to the day!) we founded Lexity with the goal of helping small businesses succeed. Since then, we’ve built an amazing set of simple, affordable and effective apps—some our own, some by our developer partners—and made them available for all merchants, including those hosted by our e-commerce platforms partners,” Kumar said in the announcement on the Lexity blog.
“Today, we are excited to join forces with Yahoo and continue building on our vision.”
All Lexity apps, including the flagship app Lexity Live, will continue to run “seamlessly” under Yahoo’s management, Kumar said. “We are putting more resources towards making them even better. We will continue to support merchants on any e-commerce platform: BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, you name it,” he wrote.
Yahoo will continue to support and enhance Commerce Central, the company’s write-once, run-anywhere platform for developers, Kumar added.
Lexity Commerce Central is the platform-as a service (PaaS) cloud platform for e-commerce, and comes with its own App Store. Commerce Central supports thousands of merchants hosted on all commerce platforms, including Magento, Etsy, eBay, Yahoo, BigCommerce and Shopify.