Wix buys Flok to add loyalty and mobile CRM to its business tools

Wix, the website building platform with more than 98 million users globally, is making another acquisition to build out the tools that it offers to businesses and individuals that use its platform to build and maintain websites and mobile apps.

Today the company is announcing that it has acquired Flok, which makes CRM solutions such as loyalty cards and chat services and rewards programs, which can be used on mobile apps and also maintained online or via a mobile app.

Financial terms of the deal, which closed today, have not been disclosed. Like Wix itself, Flok is based both in Tel Aviv and New York. It started life in 2011 as LoyalBlocks, and it had raised just under $19 million in funding from investors that include General Catalyst, Gemini Israel Ventures and Founder Collective.

Nir Zohar, the president and COO of Wix, told TechCrunch that it is bringing on the whole team as part of the deal as Flok gets integrated into Wix’s platform. “We anticipate integrating flok’s technology into our portfolio of solutions for small businesses,” he said.

“We founded flok with the goal of helping real world business effectively use digital and mobile to increase customer loyalty,” said Ido Gaver, Co-founder and CEO of flok, in a statement. “By becoming a part of the Wix team we can take our technology to new heights and do even more to empower business owners.”

Along with this, it plans to migrate all of Flok’s customers to the Wix platform. “Flok has thousands of customers located in the US, Canada, UK and Australia. flok’s customers will see no interruption in service,” Zohar said.

While Wix is known best as a competitor to the likes of WordPress to build websites, this acquisition is being made to extend the tools that Wix offers to run businesses, which essentially expands its revenue stream with customers — in this case e-commerce companies in particular.

E-commerce is a smaller but growing part of Wix’s business. Wix says it manages more than 305,000 e-commerce subscriptions globally, which makes up 15% of all its total subscriptions (versus a much larger pool of users who do not take subscriptions with Wix).

“Wix is widely known as a website building tool but we also offer a powerful cloud-based operating system for global business and adding additional CRM technology is key to our strategy and to our customer’s success,” he said. Other tools that Wix has built out beyond site building include the Wix App to manage a customer’s Wix website and the company’s our recent integration with Square for payments.

 

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