How is commerce at UTM?

Did IP Commerce fail?

• As of 2012, IP Commerce offered an "open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that serves POS 2.0 application developers with fast and easy APIs and workflows for innovative commerce solutions. Our intelligent infrastructure provides advanced two-way workflows and data for rich commerce interactions, retail offer management, multi-party fund disbursement, merchant boarding and much more – all enabled by our private-labeled Platform." In May 2013, IP Commerce decided to shut "its key business, which handles credit-card processing for companies including Groupon Inc." according to BusinessWeek (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-05-24/intel-backed-ip-commerce-shuts-payment-service-used-by-groupon). In the same article, an executive at IP Commerce, wrote that "IP Commerce plans to... focus on software for retailers, software developers and sales teams." This processing was transferred to Vantiv, a partial owner of IP Commerce. As of February 2014, IP Commerce offered two web-based services: Commerce Boarding (an on-boarding service) and Commerce Sync (to provide QuickBooks reporting of payment transactions). They don't appear to allow third parties to build and share services anymore. So what exactly happened at IP Commerce? Was it a failure or a pivot?

• Answer:

  Failure.  $40m in funding to throttle down to a couple of niche offerings was definitely not a pivot. According to people I know who are in the know it was a combination of grand vision, even grander vaporware inspired marketing, poor execution and a brick wall in the form of better run and better funded nimble competitors who out maneuvered them.