Deluxe Corporation, which provides customer loyalty and retention programs and other marketing services as well as promotional products and printed items to small businesses and financial institutions, has announced two acquisitions intended to expand its small business Web services customer base.
Deluxe’s Hostopia unit has signed a definitive agreement to purchase certain assets of Aplus.net and completed the purchase of search engine marketing firm MerchEngines. Deluxe will pay approximately $30 million for these companies.
The Aplus.net transaction will bring more than 80,000 small business subscribers of shared Web hosting, hosted e-commerce stores, managed e-mail services, domains and a variety of Web site management applications to the Deluxe customer base. Deluxe will upgrade offerings available to these customers to include mobile messaging, logo design, social networking for business, e-commerce, Web site design and e-mail marketing.
The MerchEngines’ deal adds new and more robust SEM capabilities to the Hostopia portfolio of services. It closed on July 8, with the Aplus.net transaction expected to close by the end of the month.
