FeeFighters, a three-year old comparison shopping site for credit card processors, is announcing today it has been acquired by Groupon. The Chicago-based startup, which provides businesses with a way to find the best merchant account provider for their needs, has also been offering businesses other tools such as its new payment gateway called Samurai.
FeeFighters says that the acquisition will not impact any major changes to its product line, and that most of the team will be transitioned to Groupon.
In a company blog post, FeeFighters CEO Sean Harper writes:
Our goals have always been to help small businesses run more efficiently, and by teaming up with Groupon, a pioneer in local e-commerce, we are able to execute on that goal even better than we were as an independent company.
He notes that the Samurai gateway and the FeeFighters and Samurai brands will all continue on as before, post-acquisition.
Groupon has been on a shopping spree lately, buying up a number of startups, including Kima Labs, Hyperpublic, Adku, and others in recent weeks.
With the FeeFighters acquisition, the focus is clearly on gaining technology aimed to help Groupon’s merchant partners, an area which the company has been diving into more deeply lately, with this month’s launch of the Groupon Scheduler booking service, another product that came out of an acquisition (OpenCal), as an example.
FeeFighters (formerly TransFS) is backed by $1.6 million in venture funding, which includes investments from Excelerate Labs, Hyde Park Angels, 500 Startups, Sandbox Industries, OCA Venture Partners, and Arizona Bay Technology.
As of its January round, FeeFighters stated it had saved customers $30,000,000 in processing fees, with a typical user saving 40% in fees. The company had been planning to expand its current payments business product to other business financial services (including payroll processing and employee health insurance plans).