Groupon has announced the launch of Groupon Payments, so Groupon felt left out did it feel that only deals is not going to help to sustain in marketplace. It could be another way of keeping the current merchants offering deals loyal to them.

But, their idea seems to be reasonable since personally I have seen salons and spa merchants charging extra for accepting cards. I have been actually thing about this when I visit their small merchants who or how will they be known to these kind of technologies are now designed for them and they should try it out.

For groupon it looks like they are trying to complete the circle or 360 degrees around a customer. What I mean here is Groupon will offer deal, customer will avail the deal, customer will use the deal, merchant will use groupon payment all, groupon app will track the loyalty aspect for themselves as well as for merchants. So now here comes the flavor of Loyalty & Payments truly meet each other.

So groupon app searches local deals, for local customers, tracks their loyalty, enables merchant to use cheaper payment acceptance terminals and if they add the element of social & gamification aspects I would say they are in the loyalty & payments war.

Square vs Paypal vs groupon vs Intuit for mobile payments it would be exciting to see where payment industry goes from here . More interestingly Groupon seems to be replicating the model what Square started and will it work for Groupon or no ?

So this is more cheaper or closeto than Square is offering apart from American Express.

It would be interesting to see how current Groupon merchants accept it Groupon based payments system. Local businesses interested in learning more about Groupon Payments can visit www.GrouponWorks.com/Payments. The Groupon Merchants app can be downloaded for free from the iTunes App Store.

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