Google Domains Sells to Squarespace: Does It Mean Anything?

These major website provider transition events don't happen very often, but there are examples in the last decade. One big difference this time is that the asset is domain registration, not websites. That is a critical difference.

That said, it's still useful to look back at the last two times website transitions happened:

In 2014, BigCommerce was chosen as the partner for eBay as it closed its eBay ProStores (acquisition) platform and Magento Go (ill-fated SaaS version of Magento RIP).

* At the time, 50,000 stores used BigCommerce.

* eBay's Platforms had 10,000 stores. So 20% of your current merchant count is a huge number.

This gave BigCommerce needed validation at the time.

In 2015, in an irony not lost on me, Amazon closed its WebStores business and chose Shopify as its partner to migrate its merchants to.

* At the time, Shopify had 175,000 merchants.

* While no official estimates were released then, Scot Wingo's estimates at the time said there were approximately 2,000 Amazon Webstores. (Though this seemed low to me, even at the time)

Despite the number, it is widely credited that this gave Shopify a boost compared to other platforms at the time - after all, Amazon the king of eCommerce was anointing Shopify to help its customers. Think Amazon wants a mulligan on that decision?

In 2023, things are new.

* Google is selling its Domains business to Squarespace which includes 10 million domains. While these are not all websites, that's a big number and includes "millions" of customers.

* While not a direct competitor as you might think (Shopify is much more advanced), at the low end I do see small service-based businesses or single-product businesses sometimes choosing Squarespace for their eCommerce or transactional websites. So there are some eCommerce-adjacent concerns to consider here.

I have more questions than answers about this deal:

• What percentage of these 10 million domains are attached to websites, and where are the hosts for these websites today?

• What kind of incentive programs will Squarespace offer these former Google Domains to develop their web assets on Squarespace?

• What other companies were bidding for these assets?

• Will there be any future regrets by any parties (including Google) for letting this business go? (GoDaddy, Namecheap in particular, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that Shopify took a look).

I do expect that if Shopify did pass on this deal, the primary reason would be that who knows who owns these domains, and how likely they are to develop into eCommerce. The hit rate could be very low from an upsell point of view.

* Does this deal make Squarespace more likely to get acquired or acquire other assets to continue putting together a more complete eCommerce offering?