Any business will find the need to be able to accept payments at any time and anywhere. Whether you’re at a customer’s office or a remote location, it would be handy to accept payment the minute you make the sale.
If you’re a small business, it also doesn’t seem worth it to go through the expense and hassle of setting up merchant accounts in order to accept credit card payments for a few sales a month or year. There is Paypal, which allows you to forgo contracts and monthly fees, but that’s still not as easy as this mobile card reader I just came accross.
The new product is called Square and it allows you to plug-in a little square into your headphone jack (currently only for the iPhone or ipod) and swipe credit cards.
squareup card reader
It supposedly does a lot of cool things:
- Eliminates the need for contracts with merchant accounts and monthly fees.
- Since it plugs in to your mobile phone, I’m assuming it works anywhere you get a phone signal or Internet connection.
- Allows you to go paperless with your receipts by texting or emailing them to your customers.
- You can do frequent customer programs, like buy 10 get 1 free, so you can eliminate paper punch cards
This is all pulled from their website, so I’m just going off of what they have published.
I initially read about the square on this Channel News article and they have a few more details.
Alas, there isn’t too much more information besides that they are beta testing this service right now and expect to do a full launch in early 2010. No word on whether this service will be available in Canada or not. Probably not since we seem to always be behind these type of technological innovations by a year or two (eg. iphone, tivo).
