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Comment by henryaj | Hacker News Reader

Talk about being late to the game... iZettle has been around since 2011[a]!

[a] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IZettle

I wonder how they'll compete. My sandwich man at work, and street vendors at the market all have iZettle now. Perhaps square will take less of a cut?

I see a lot of coffee shops and market stalls with iZettle too.

Interestingly Square seems more expensive than iZettle. Square is flat 1.75% in-person 2.5% online while iZettle is sliding 2.75%-1%. The threshold seems to be £6200/month at which point iZettle is going below 1.75%. That's pretty low so I suspect most shops would still chose them.

You could almost certainly negotiate the rate down with Square. Maybe not for £6200/month, but at a certain volume they'll do you a deal. There's no way Philz Coffee (big coffee chain in the bay), for example, are paying Square their advertised flat rate.

Surprised they didn't just buy iZettle, who own both the market and the mindshare for these types of devices in Europe.

iZettle raises $63M more at a $500M valuation; company has raised about $235 million in funding to date.

Guessing they've had offers, but not good enough to make them sell and they're still able to raise capital.

Square's market cap is currently $6.51B and here's there balance sheet: https://markets.ft.com/data/equities/tearsheet/financials?s=...

iZettle are counting on exactly this, a North American player buying them for their market share. Margins are non-existent

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