With GoDaddy Payments, Web Impresario GoDaddy Starts Building on Its Poynt Deal

The first fruits of GoDaddy Inc.’s acquisition six months ago of payments-technology provider Poynt Inc. emerged Tuesday with the announcement of GoDaddy Payments, a service aimed at unifying payments capabilities for GoDaddy’s base of e-commerce clients.

To start with, GoDaddy Payments will focus on e-commerce transactions for clients using GoDaddy Websites + Marketing and Managed WordPress WooCommerce services. Later in the year, the service will add card-present transactions, the company says, building on strengths 8-year-old Poynt started out with when it began releasing its line of point-of-sale terminals. GoDaddy indicated in December that half of its clients also operate physical stores.

For now, though, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Web registrar will rely on Poynt’s expertise in e-commerce technology to help build the new payments service. “GoDaddy Payments represents a major step towards centralizing every tool and service a business needs to successfully sell online,” said Osama Bedier, GoDaddy’s president of commerce, in a statement. “Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and we look forward to accelerating our efforts.” 

Bedier joined GoDaddy after the company paid $320 million in cash to acquire Poynt, which he founded in 2013. The deal includes another $45 million in cash in deferred payments over three years. At the time of the December announcement, Poynt was processing $16 billion annually in gross merchandise volume directly and through resellers.

GoDaddy Payments promises fast and easy setup, with payments deposited by the next business day. The service will be integrated with a single dashboard that also manages other functions of the site, a feature that promises to allow users to manage the entire site from a single account, GoDaddy says, adding the service will accept all major-brand credit and debit cards with what it calls “a low transaction fee.”

Besides in-person payments, more services may be coming even farther down the road. Top executives at GoDaddy indicated in December that the full capabilities made possible by the acquisition of Poynt would not arrive until 2023. “Our initial focus will be to support our customers in the United States, Canada, India, and Australia,” GoDaddy chief executive Aman Bhutani told equity analysts at the time. “We want to reduce the friction between offline and online [commerce]. That’s why Poynt is so interesting to us.”