Many people don’t know this but Batesville Casket Company is the largest provider of funeral home websites. Yep, they are larger than Frazer Consultants, FuneralNet, and even FuneralOne. A few years ago Batesville purchased WebFH, a company that had built websites for over 3,000 funeral homes. On Wednesday Batesville added to the number of funeral home websites they own when they purchased Memorial Solutions.
Batesville has been on a buying spree of late with purchases of Goria Vault Company, K-Tron International, and now Memorial Solutions. Niether company has released anything official announcing the purchase, but I have confirmed the purchase with multiple sources.
I also believe the picture below paints a pretty clear picture.
This is a screenshot from the home page of Memorial Solutions, the “Powered By Batesville Interactive” was added to the site on Wednesday.
In the last 12 months Batesville has made many different announcements regarding tech news not casket news:
– At NFDA Batesville announced a partnership with Legacy.com
– In January they Launched ObitLink as part of their “Connectivity Suite”
– In April they launch a new online ordering system
Why did Batesville make this purchase?
I don’t think anyone knows yet but here is my thoughts:
I think that this purchase was in the works well before now and here is why. SCI is Batesville largest customer, SCI just finalized its purchase of Keystone North America, Keystone had a previous agreement with MemorialSolutions.com to be their official website provider. I think that this purchase, of Memorial Solutions, may have been part of the deal somehow.
I also was told that the owners of Memorial Solutions were going to stay on board. This make sense because Batesville has done nothing to advance the technology and functionality of the WebFH websites since they purchased them. My guess is that the old WebFH sites will be rebuilt by Memorial Solutions.
Batesville has been busy producing all of this tech news while their casket brand is seeing record lows.
This makes me ask: Does Batesville Want To Be A Casket Company or Tech Company?
