But before the company could market them widely in this country, he said, there were those merchant relationships to rebuild.
"The team at Ciao has built a passionate consumer community based on intuitive technology and extensive merchant relationships that we believe will deliver incremental benefit to the Microsoft Live Search platform," Microsoft's vice president for Windows and online services, Tami Reller, said.
3) Groupon has massive ongoing merchant relationships.
Despite the flash nature of Groupon and LivingSocial, their merchant relationships are significant.
Instead, we believe Monthly Recurring Revenue, or MRR, is most closely correlated with the long-term value of our merchant relationships.
"In markets where we have strong merchant relationships, you can expect to see in-app payments, and realtime consumer-merchant interaction very soon".
"In markets where we have strong merchant relationships, you can expect to see in-app payments, and realtime consumer-merchant interaction very soon". This will be in addition to the native ads that currently monetise the service.
Especially as the startup's competitive advantages have allowed for deeper penetration into local markets and allowed it to forge long-term merchant relationships in, it just so happens, more than 20 college towns in California.
Today, some more details about the deal: A source close to the situation confirms that Amazon bought the technology and the engineering/product team of GoPago, but none of the existing point of sale business and current merchant relationships.
One avenue of success would be to already have one side of the equation in hand: either a vast number of consumer eyeballs or tens of thousands of existing merchant relationships.
