Groupon Rebrands Mobile Payments Biz As Breadcrumb, Adds iPad Merchant App And A $5k No-Fee Deal To Bring On New Users

A day after Groupon released (and then pulled) an iPad app with a new mobile payments dashboard for businesses, today the company is taking the wraps off a bigger piece of news around its larger plans to expand its commerce services for local merchants. Building on its Breadcrumb payments and commerce service for restaurants, which Groupon acquired last year, the company today is rebranding its wider payments service — and the final version of that free iPad app — under the same name. The new iPad app for merchants of all stripes is called “Breadcrumb POS,” while the old Breadcrumb app for restaurants will now be called “Breacrumb Pro.” Both will be here when they go live on the app store. Sound confusing for both to be called Breadcrumb? Streamlining names is usually meant to simplify things. Groupon says that in fact this is what is happening here: “As it turned out, when we spoke to merchants at salons and other retailers, they were fine with the name Breadcrumb,” says Mihir Shah, VP for Merchant OS at Groupon. “It was about how good are the rates, and the quality of the actual POS product and software.” Indeed, it makes sense for Groupon to position like this, considering that the marketing play of targeting those who have never been able to process credit cards before is now a little me-too. “We?re not just targeting simple paymet solutions for those who didn’t take credit cards before,” says Shah. “We?re offering a better service to them.” Both the app, and Groupon’s wider payment services — they also include the Groupon Merchants apps that sit on iPhone and Android handsets, which turn them into credit card readers — are U.S.-only for now. The company is still working on expanding this internationally to the 500,000 merchants it says already use Groupon’s platform for daily deals and other offers. As we noted yesterday, expanding payments services is part of the company’s bigger ambition to take its business beyond daily deals and into other revenue streams. But, because Groupon is coming into the market of mobile payments and local commerce relatively late — Square, PayPal’s here and others have already been here for a while scooping up business –?Groupon is being aggressive on both the rates it charges, and also in making the service as easy to integrate as possible into a business. To attract new payments

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