Credit Card Processor Pushes Limits With Product

Total Merchant Services is branching out. The Woodland Hills company that started with credit card processing for small- and medium-sized businesses is moving into providing point-of-sale, marketing and data analysis services to retailers. Total Merchant introduced this suite of products, named Groovv, at the Electronic Transaction Association Show in Las Vegas earlier this month. Groovv is a way for Chief Executive Joe Kaplan to build value around retail transactions and deepen relationships with clients. “We are being transformed from just a payments technology company,” he said. Assembling the pieces of Groovv began about a year ago with the acquisition of Fanminder, a Silicon Valley social and mobile marketing firm that became the basis for Groovv Offers. A second acquisition, Registroid LLC, a Mobile, Ala. developer of software for retail and restaurant transactions, is now called Groovv Register and supplies point-of-sale services using Android devices. Financial details of those deals were not disclosed. The third piece is Groovv API, a program that integrates the payments, customer data and online marketing services in a real-time format. The merchants themselves don’t need to understand all the technological back-end that makes these services work. The Groovv suite is easy to use, said Shelley Plomske, vice president of product. “These are owners and operators and they are not IT people and not marketers,” Plomske said. Total Merchant makes the Android-based point-of-sale readers and registers available for free, which can be up and running in 10 minutes. Merchants are then charged a monthly fee for the payment processing services. Groovv Offers, the marketing tool, is also provided free of charge. About 5,000 customers are using the service that allows retailers to create promotional campaigns and then send email, text messages or alerts over social media sites to get the word out. Combining the marketing with data analysis and a business owner can see where their revenue comes from, what items sell better than others and when the most sales take place, Plomske said. “If they understand Tuesdays are slow, they can create a campaign to get folks in the door during those times,” she added. Brand Simplicity Content delivery network provider MaxCDN has consolidated its brands into a single one to serve both consumers and large corporate clients. HDDN, a video distribution network, and CloudCache were rebranded as MaxCDN for consumer and home office users. NetDNA, a provider of content delivery for clients using more than 50 terabytes a month, became known as MaxCDN Enterprise. The name changes will allow the Studio City company to reduce overhead and marketing costs as well as confusion by potential clients, said David Henzel, a co-founder and vice president of marketing. “By having multiple names it was not serving the customers well,” Henzel said. MaxCDN, started by its partners five years ago, can make website work faster by hosting servers closer to where the site visitors are. So, for instance, a person in Europe going to a website based in Los Angeles would actually get content – text, graphics, software, media files, streaming media, etc. – from servers in Europe. A quicker connection results in better rankings in search engines and in the conversion rate for making purchases at e-commerce sites, Henzel said. Additionally, the local servers can prevent crashes at heavily used sites. “We take the load off the main server with the multiple locations,” Henzel said. With servers throughout the U.S., in Europe and Asia, MaxCDN has access to more than 90 countries. When MaxCDN started, content delivery networks could be expensive, costing thousands of dollars a month and requiring multi-year contracts. MaxCDN made the model affordable with price plans starting at $9 a month for small businesses. The monthly price increases depending on the speed of the connection and the number of websites served. MaxCDN has a 6.8 percent market share out of the top 1 million websites, according to a Datanyze, a San Mateo company that tracks web technologies. The company counts Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. in Yokohama, Japan, Forbes Inc. in New York City, and BuySellAds.com in Boston among its customers. But about 80 percent of the clientele are smaller businesses, Henzel said. That MaxCDN was in the Valley appealed to web hosting provider Zerolag in Sherman Oaks, said Will Bernstein, executive vice president. The two companies have partnered on a co-branded content delivery network as a standard offering for Zerolag’s clients. Bernstein learned about MaxCDN from a colleague and chose it as a vendor for its impressive service offering that was easy to integrate. “Their network infrastructure and underlying technology allows their service to be lighting fast,” Bernstein said. Staff Reporter Mark R. Madler can be reached at (818) 316-3126 or [email protected].