51–60 of 152 posts
In case anyone from square is reading this - you're page loads absolutely 0 content with JS disabled. Just some feedback, take it or leave it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are virtually no fixed costs to actually performing the transactions. The fees are levied by the not-so-competitive Visa/Mastercard/AMEX trio that would love to keep their fees artificially high.
there are actually a ton of costs for them. They have to pay for infrastructure, they have to pay for customer support, they have to pay for fraudulent transactions and on and on. I think most credit card companies have something like 10%-15% ROI
This is why large e-commerce companies have giant fraud departments trying to prevent fraudulent orders and charges on their site; because when they occur, they generally just eat the loss.
So two things that I've never understood. 1) Why is it just now that someone's actually providing competitive service in this space? We've had people selling CC machines and service for years... 2) Where (in general, not just with Square) does the money actually go? It seems that prior to Square announcing this, getting under 2-3% or so was nearly impossible. On the scale of the US economy alone, that's HUGE money. W…
Hi tibbon! To answer 1: Almost all of the fee structure goes to players much higher up the chain than Square. The networks take a chunk, but in fact most of the fee goes to the originating bank (the bank that issued the card). This is a major source of income for most banks these days and can generally be arbitrarily set by them since merchants not only have no other options except cash, but also cannot tell what the…
Another way of thinking about credit cards is a way that a large groups of customers are able to band together to collectively demand discounts, rewards and other valuable protections from merchants in exchange for their business.
The banks compete amongst themselves to win your business as a cardholder by trying to negotiate higher discounts from merchants. (the fees paid by merchants are called MDR or merchant discount rate).
So two things that I've never understood. 1) Why is it just now that someone's actually providing competitive service in this space? We've had people selling CC machines and service for years... 2) Where (in general, not just with Square) does the money actually go? It seems that prior to Square announcing this, getting under 2-3% or so was nearly impossible. On the scale of the US economy alone, that's HUGE money. W…
Hi tibbon! To answer 1: Almost all of the fee structure goes to players much higher up the chain than Square. The networks take a chunk, but in fact most of the fee goes to the originating bank (the bank that issued the card). This is a major source of income for most banks these days and can generally be arbitrarily set by them since merchants not only have no other options except cash, but also cannot tell what the…
So two things that I've never understood. 1) Why is it just now that someone's actually providing competitive service in this space? We've had people selling CC machines and service for years... 2) Where (in general, not just with Square) does the money actually go? It seems that prior to Square announcing this, getting under 2-3% or so was nearly impossible. On the scale of the US economy alone, that's HUGE money. W…
I see a potential for abuse - if the cash back on certain credit cards exceeds the max rate, people could cycle money through for profit. e.g. I had a 2% cash back credit card Cashback: 21k/mo * 2%=$420 Fees: $275 Upside potential: $145/mo Not much profit possible, but with multiple accounts at roughly 2 $400 swipes per day per account, I would watch out for something like this.
In this case, who makes up the difference? I would assume that it would be on Square's end to make up the 2%-1.32% difference, so it's likely that Square would be the one to terminate your account. However, I do wonder what kind of perks you get from a credit card company if you could spend $250k/year with them.
Through the use of elementary arithmetic, Square is charging every company the average expected transaction fees for the month, regardless of whether the actual transaction fees would be higher or lower than this. So half the companies save money while the other half lose money. This is being spun as an innovation when, in reality, it's likely to net Square more revenue as there are probably more merchants between $0…
Through the use of elementary arithmetic, Square is charging every company the average expected transaction fees for the month, regardless of whether the actual transaction fees would be higher or lower than this. So half the companies save money while the other half lose money. This is being spun as an innovation when, in reality, it's likely to net Square more revenue as there are probably more merchants between $0…
It's a good deal for any business swiping over $10k/month on average.
The next step for Square, in my opinion, is developing a reader for the EMV cards ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV ), which is hugely dominant in Europe - and also more secure. See a this useful Quora post, from 12 months ago: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Square-intend-to-translate-the... Going international, or making such a reader, opens up an enormous market and the potential is huge. I'm waiting, excited, as I…
There are dozens of chip readers on the market all around the world already, they just don't have the software, good design and price structure to match.
Answer-wiki pasted in for convenience:
«US only:
- Paypal Here ( https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader , US)
- Intuit Go Payment (http://gopayment.com/, US)
- Payware Mobile by Verifone ( http://www.paywaremobile.com/en , US)
- Phone Swipe (http://www.phoneswipe.com/, US)
Europe only:
- iZettle (http://izettle.com/ , Sweden, chipcard reader)
- Cellphony (http://www.cellfony.com/, FR, still in beta)
- iPay by PrivatBank (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ipay/id307368715?mt=8 , Ukrainia)»