- Date
- May 21, 2018
- Kind
- Acquisition
- Significance
- High
On May 21, 2018, Adobe announced a definitive agreement to acquire Magento Commerce for $1.68 billion. Adobe said the platform would be embedded in its Experience Cloud, so that commerce sits beside content, analytics and campaign tools in one suite.
What Adobe was buying
- Magento was founded in 2008 and handles digital commerce, order management and business intelligence for business-to-business and business-to-consumer selling.
- According to the announcement, it was built on open-source technology, had a developer community of more than 300,000 and processed $155 billion in annual gross merchandise volume. These are figures from the announcement, as reported by SiliconANGLE.
The close
The deal was expected to close in the third quarter of 2018. Adobe’s annual report for fiscal 2018 says it paid about $1.68 billion in cash and completed the acquisition on June 18, 2018.
Brad Rencher, then executive vice president of Digital Experience at Adobe, described the logic as making every moment personal and every experience shoppable.
Why it matters
It was an early sign that the large experience suites wanted to own the point of sale as well as the content and the campaign. Marketing and commerce data in one vendor is also the idea behind many later suite deals.
What happened next
Adobe’s annual report says the acquisition completed on June 18, 2018. Adobe Commerce is among the products Adobe names in its 2026 announcement of the Semrush deal.