Amazon Launches Local Register
Amazon released a new Square-like service called Local Register. It’s similar in that it can make your tablet or phone into a digital cash register and you can accept credit cards with the card reader.
In regards to pricing, you pay $10 for the card reader, but no setup or monthly fees. There’s a limited time 1.75% swipe rate if you sign up by October 31, 2014 that’ll be good until December 31, 2015. After that, it’s 2.5%, which is generally lower than its competitors, like Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Intuit GoPayment may work out to be cheaper though, depending on transaction volume, as they have a 1.75% swipe rate plus $.25 transaction fee if you pay a $19.95 monthly fee.
Amazon’s Local Register will work on the latest iOS and Fire devices right from the get go. Android support right now is limited to Samsung Galaxy S3, S4, and S5. There’s also an ecosystem of products that go with it, such as receipt printers and cash registers.
Amazon Local Register looks like a competent offering and it’ll be interesting to see how this impacts the already competitive and fast moving mobile payments market.
Apple Pay to Launch
There’s a lot of hubbub about this, but what does this mean for small businesses? Let me start by quickly explaining what Apple Pay is.
To pay at a store, you take out your iPhone, the terminal senses your phone close by, and you put your finger over the touch ID sensor to pay. It uses NFC (Near Field Communication) to transmit the transaction and the touch ID is what authorizes it.
Payments using NFC (or as some people call it contactless payments) isn’t new. Google Wallet and Softcard (formerly ISIS) have been around for a while. However, the relationships with the bank and retailers just weren’t that widespread.
Out of the starting gates, Apple Pay has some major banks on board, like American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citi, and Wells Fargo. Not every bank is supported, but there are enough big ones that it’s significant. As for retailers, there are 220,000 retail locations where Apple Pay will be accepted, but this still means that the vast majority – we’re talking about over 90% of retailers – won’t accept Apple Pay.
Something beyond the cool pay with your phone factor is the security. Secure tokens are used so that your credit card and identity information aren’t revealed. Apple also doesn’t save credit card details on their servers.
An important thing for small businesses to know is that this may finally be the start of the widespread adoption of NFC card readers. Since NFC is not proprietary, this means that it can be used for Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Softcard, any payment system that can take advantage of NFC.
- Apple Pay Site
- What Every Retailer Needs to Know About Apple Pay
- Tomorrow Apple Will Officially Kill the Credit Card
- Why Apple Might Succeed Where Google and Visa Have Failed
- Forget the Watch, Apple Pay is the Real Game Changer
- TechCrunch Apple Pay Demo (Video)
I forgot to mention this in the video, but Stripe, Authorize.net, and Braintree will all support Apple Pay
Braintree to Accept Bitcoin and PayPal Launches One Touch
Bitcoin continues to receive support. In a few months, you’ll be able to use braintree’s v.zero SDK to allow customers to pay via Bitcoin. However, it’s not just anyone with Bitcoin, it has to be a user with a Coinbase wallet. What’s interesting about this is that Braintree is a daughter company to PayPal which is owned by eBay. So this signals that PayPal and eBay are on the path to accepting Bitcoin, which is significant.
In related news, that same v.zero SDK of braintree’s can be used to enable PayPal’s new One Touch Payments. For a consumer to use One Touch Payments, they must login to PayPal on their smartphone. After that, they only need to tap once to buy something… well, provided that they’ve first authorized the merchant. After they authorize the merchant one time, it becomes one touch pay. Apple Pay actually works in a similar fashion for in-app purchases, where you can press Apple Pay and then verify the payment with touch ID.
- Braintree Blog
- eBay Payments Unit Braintree to Let Merchants Accept Bitcoin
- PayPal’s Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments
- PayPal One Touch (Video)
Final Thoughts
Digital payments are really heating up, bringing us one step closer to cashless society. However, we’re definitely not there yet. Also, with all these digital transactions we still don’t have a good flow of data going out to
Most small businesses don’t know where to get the data from. Does it come from the payment provider, from the POS (Point of Sale) terminal, or the eCommerce Store? As great as these payments improvements are, accounting software needs better access to the data.