Part of its larger plan to diversify beyond deals and move into services like scheduling, Groupon announced it had acquired restaurant iPad POS and CRM system Breadcrumb:
Breadcrumb will continue to serve new and existing clients and we look forward to offering their product to our existing merchant partners. Also, for Groupon merchant partners that use Breadcrumb’s point of sale system, we’ll be able to significantly improve the process of redeeming a Groupon.
This will allow all Breadcrumb’s customers to integrate with Groupon, Groupon Now and Rewards and close the loop on POS redemption. There will also be visibility on customer spending patterns that Groupon currently doesn’t have. Indeed there’s lots of data that Breadcrumb can feed to Groupon.
It’s a very interesting acquisition and one that suggests other such “operational” and “infrastructure” acquisitions and services in the future for the company. If Demandforce hadn’t already been acquired by Intuit it would have been a likely Groupon target.
May 30th, 2012 at 4:40 am
Another good solid move by Groupon. This works well alongside the booking service that they bought.
This is a good example of how being the market leader, and raising a tonne of cash, is going to help Groupon stay for the long term whilst all of the copycats die off.
May 30th, 2012 at 1:52 pm
Yes. Agree.
October 10th, 2012 at 1:58 pm
[...] Cash registers are going away. It may take a little while by the traditional register and POS systems that have long dominated retail and restaurants are starting to disappear and be replaced by iPad-based systems. Earlier this year (in May) Groupon bought one of the vendors in this space: Breadcrumb. [...]