Mobile Card Processing is an emerging technology targeted at small businesses that traditionally would not be able to accept payments by credit or debit cards. Think about it: people like chiropodists, mobile hairdressers, babysitters, plumbers, taxi-drivers, trade-fair exhibitors: anyone who runs their business at multiple locations and for whom a cash register and a merchant terminal would be impractical.
The idea is to harness the massive amount of processing power already lurking in commonly-owned devices such as the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android Phone, enabling their owners to use them as their card payments processor.
The new systems currently hitting the market include the Square, invented by Twitter founder and technology entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, Intuit GoPayment, from the purveyors of Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax, and Sage Mobile Payments.
The Square system, launched in the US
GoPayment from Intuit, compatible with iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and BlackBerry, also provides a free card reader and makes a charge for each transaction, and is currently offering a free 60-day trial.
Sage Mobile Payments, launched in February 2011, offers a credit card reader that can plug into the audio jack of a smartphone. The company plans to charge customers a setup fee and then a monthly amount starting at $10.95, but no transaction fees. Their intended customers are SMEs, with a higher payment transaction volume than the sole proprietor and microbusinesses targeted by Jack Dorsey’s Square.
In summary, it looks like these mobile payment solutions are offering a cheaper (or free) , easy-to-use and portable alternative to the traditional card swipe terminal. Small business proprietors, in the US at least, no longer need to be tethered to a cash register, and have a new, viable alternative avoiding the setup costs currently charged for a merchant terminal. I will be keeping an eye on the progress of mobile payment systems over the coming months to see how they fare and who takes up the new technology.
Thanks for the great post mentioning Sage Mobile Payments. I need to correct something, however. We are not offering Sage Mobile Payments with NO transaction fees. Rather, we are offering the product with no incremental mobile processing/transaction fees, meaning there are NO ADDITIONAL processing or transaction fees on top of the NORMAL processing fees associated with credit and debit card processing. Some vendors are charging regular transaction fees, PLUS additional mobile transaction fees, for their mobile payments products. We are only charging merchants whatever they would normally pay to process a regular credit card transaction; there is no mark-up simply because the merchant is using a mobile phone. The set-up fee is as low as $35 and the monthly fee as low as $10.95.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment Cyndi; that makes the pricing structure crystal clear.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you have seen the blog and hope you enjoy reading it.
I do work hard to make my postings accurate as well as entertaining and informative, but it's not always easy to achieve that in the space of a short article!
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