PayPal taking on Square Up

[graylocks]

Square Up was the first company to enable small businesses, especially very small businesses like myself, to accept credit card payments on a smartphone for a reasonable fee and without a merchant account with a monthly fee. i always thought it was a game changer in empowering the micro-merchant.

PayPal is coming up with a similar offering called PayPal Here. slightly lower fee rate and with strong name recognition. I think the name recognition is going to significantly hurt Square Up. I often have to educate people about Square Up. With PPH i could probably just say it's a PayPal thing and people would feel at ease with.

competition is a good thing but i sure hope Square Up survives.

[space-time]

keep both accounts and explain to people that you prefer Square Up but if they want you can also process PayPal. You do want Square Up to survive as you said it.

[graylocks]

space-time wrote:
keep both accounts and explain to people that you prefer Square Up but if they want you can also process PayPal. You do want Square Up to survive as you said it.

that is probably what i'll wind up doing. i'm willing to pay the slightly higher fee to Square to keep them viable.

[vision63]

I use Intuit's dealie and Square Up. Square is way simpler. I use it all the time and never have a problem with it. Out of hundreds of customers, no one has sweated me over it except for the couple of times I went out of my way to "explain" it to them beforehand. It's better to just grab their card and swipe it.

[mattkime]

I hope SquareUp starts an auction site.

[Carnos Jax]

graylocks wrote: ...i'm willing to pay the slightly higher fee to Square to keep them viable.

Same here. I don't use any service like this yet, but if I do, it'll be Square Up

[hal]

How fast does square up answer the phone?

I dance with devils often so paypal doesn't scare me. In fact, I've contacted them dozens of times to deal with crappy transactions and they answer the phone pretty darned quickly.

I'd LOVE to support a smaller competitor, but hiring customer service to handle support is usually the most expensive cost a small company has to deal with. Some will cut corners anywhere they can and customer service is always the first to suffer. I'd want to do some research before I'd go with an unknown rather than the devil I know.

gray - you've done a lot with them - have you dealt with their CS?

[graylocks]

hal wrote:

gray - you've done a lot with them - have you dealt with their CS?

no because i've not had any problems. over the two years+ the service has gotten more and more streamlined. you charge. you get immediate acknowledgement. the money is swept into your bank account the next day. i'm not high volume, maybe a few hundred a month. i don't know if they still do but they used to put some kind of hold on large amounts of money before sweeping and that would piss some people off but for me it's been pretty darn sweet.

[hal]

thanks - I've been following your posts on this. keep it up when new info comes to light...

[JoeM]

The company I work for works with Square. They are a solid company with good backing but there are a number of other competitors gunning for the market now. Besides PayPal, there's Verifone, Intuit, PhoneSwipe here in the US and others over in Europe. There are other smaller Mac developers working on getting into the market as well. Expect things to heat up and change in a short time frame.