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Square Readers free [1]
Heckler Design WindFall iPad Stand $129.99 (free shipping) [2]
APG Vasario 1616 Cash Drawer $102.18 (free shipping) [3]
I don't understand why I would pay $66.83 for the convenience of having these items shipped to me in a pretty box.
[1]: https://squareup.com/reader [2]: http://hecklerdesign.com/windfall/ [3]: http://www.amazon.com/APG-Vasario-VB-1616-MultiPRO-interface...
Disclosure : I work for GoPago, a direct competitor in this market. I am approaching this with a lot of built-in bias. Square is pretty late to the game. Their software is pretty, but it has a much smaller featureset than every other tablet-based POS software out there (including our own competitors). Additionally, their prices do not include the cost of the iPad, which is another $500 on top of this 'business in a b…
But at this point I might bet on the company with masterful marketing. If there is going to be a de facto standard for SMB POS Square might be able to get there. If Clayton Christensen (Innovator Dilemma) taught me anything it's that feature gaps can be closed quickly. Marketing/Mindshare gaps, not so much.
Imagine two competitors. Mine got to market first, it had a better feature set, and was more similar to what the consumer was used to (based on similar products on other platforms).
But a competitor shows up. Their product had less features and was "different" to the established things. But their product was easier to use, it had better marketing, and people just flocked to it.
It literally took six months for the competitor to match my offering in terms of features but ultimately none of that matters because if the marketing is good and the UI is easy to use people will just work around everything else/put up with it.
By the time they matched my feature set the writing was already on the wall. Even if I had released an update matching their UI it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference since they already had the reputation/user-base.
Disclosure : I work for GoPago, a direct competitor in this market. I am approaching this with a lot of built-in bias. Square is pretty late to the game. Their software is pretty, but it has a much smaller featureset than every other tablet-based POS software out there (including our own competitors). Additionally, their prices do not include the cost of the iPad, which is another $500 on top of this 'business in a b…
But at this point I might bet on the company with masterful marketing. If there is going to be a de facto standard for SMB POS Square might be able to get there. If Clayton Christensen (Innovator Dilemma) taught me anything it's that feature gaps can be closed quickly. Marketing/Mindshare gaps, not so much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok. Lets hope those with accessibility issues (screen-readers, etc), people with constrained systems (old, corporate, etc), and whoever else might not be able or willing to use js can figure something out then. Oh, they have! They won't visit your site. Cool!
With 98% of screen reader users having Javascript enabled [1], I'm willing to bet it's not really an issue for them. I'm then left wondering who these people are that have daily-use systems so old that they cannot run Javascript in their browser, and why they are such an important market. [1] http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey3/#javascript
They are important, because they tend to be the people who fix the things the "Look, shiny!" people bork.
Disclosure : I work for GoPago, a direct competitor in this market. I am approaching this with a lot of built-in bias. Square is pretty late to the game. Their software is pretty, but it has a much smaller featureset than every other tablet-based POS software out there (including our own competitors). Additionally, their prices do not include the cost of the iPad, which is another $500 on top of this 'business in a b…
Since the start one of Square's major advantages is their deceptively simple user interface - their conversion rate of getting interested merchant's email / info is likely many multiples over competitor's contact rate.
Unsolicited free advice is worth what you paid for it, but feel free to drop me a line via my profile if you'd like some actionable recommendations for closing that gap . . .
I would honestly love to have a flag saying [US only, don't bother if you're not from there] on articles (like that one) EDIT: this is genuinely not a snarky comment, but this this company will likely go bankrupt before I could use it (for example paypal is not universally available, in SA you need to have an account with a specific bank)
I'll save the HN programmers some cycles: everything here is [US only].
One thing Square continues to do right is design. Making a POS system sexy is not an easy thing to do.
That's a great thing. My wife and I own a small boutique, and we've been using Square since before the public launch in the App Store. We've just about outgrown it, but have been challenged to find another solution that fits in-between the low cost, extremely easy to use Square and the traditional high-cost, complex to set up POS solutions.
As one of their employees here has said, GoPago seems to fit that nicely, but we're not decided yet whether we want to commit to a $100 / month payment. Being a hacker, there's also the fact that I have a room full of hardware in the back I've collected over the years, which includes a nice flash-based small format PC, a comparably tiny monitor, bar code readers, and a couple of retail thermal printers.
I know I'll never actually sit down and hack out a POS system, but it's nice to think about and the idea has helped in keeping me from sinking a wad of cash into a system I don't absolutely have to have yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not affiliated with either company and my only experience with operating a physical storefront are restaurants. That being said, after taking a quick look at the front-facing material on both sites, I have a question for you/GoPago: While the point you make about the initial cost being higher (about 1k with iPad) is valid, Square seems to run a pricing scheme where they charge a flat $275 per month and get rid o…
Square's $275 plan is only for the first 250k ; after that they charge a normal credit-card rate. What's the value of GoPago over Square for that 50k merchant? Mobile Storefront -- which has been a fantastic discovery tool to connect consumers with merchants on GoPago. It allows people to place orders on their phone to the POS terminal itself, no phone-calls necessary. We also have a much more robust reporting suite,…
Are they just addons? For instance, "add cheese" for $1 to an existing menu item? Or are modifiers something else entirely?
Disclosure : I work for GoPago, a direct competitor in this market. I am approaching this with a lot of built-in bias. Square is pretty late to the game. Their software is pretty, but it has a much smaller featureset than every other tablet-based POS software out there (including our own competitors). Additionally, their prices do not include the cost of the iPad, which is another $500 on top of this 'business in a b…