Foursquare has been working to amp up their merchant program. They’ve been exploring new partnerships and recently teamed up with American Express to offer cardholders cash back. Last week, Foursquare announced that it hit 500,000 merchant accounts and in order to support those half a million merchants, the company has made some changes that make it easier for companies to use their program — they’ve released a Merchant API.

Foursquare’s Merchant API will allow businesses to create innovative specials using any kind of technology they want. They no longer have to log in to Foursquare to access and change their specials and can integrate their specials into existing properties. This is particularly useful for companies who own many Web properties and are running multiple campaigns. It’s a hassle to have to log in to Foursquare to access analytics and change specials. Now they can integrate Foursquare right into the analytics platforms they already use.

Foursquare has been working with a number of companies who are integrating the service into their dashboards. Yext, a service for business listings, already launched their dashboard integration. Patch, the hyper-local news site owned by AOL, CityGrid and Clickable are expecting to launch their integrations soon.

With the launch of this new API, we can expect more merchants to adopt Foursquare’s platform. Hopefully, combined with their daily deals partnerships, the location-based service will be able to develop a sturdy source of revenue.