Square Terminal
squareup.com
squareup.com
Instead, right now we get this madness, especially at a lot of smaller shops, where the clerk is using the merchant side box to enter the payment amount then fumbles around with the customer side pad to insert the card and complete the transaction for me.
Just let me tap or enter my PIN, please.
(I have two cards that are PIN primary. I've put stickers on both that read, in large letters, "THIS CARD USES A PIN PLEASE ALLOW ME TO ENTER IT." On one of them, it has, in smaller letters, "THE TRANSACTION WILL DECLINE IF YOU DON'T.")
That said, I'm with you; I much prefer to have my card handled just once and within sight. It is faster, safer, and, to my mind, simply more convenient.
And that is considered "cheap"! By contrast, in the European Union there's a cap of 0.3% on credit card interchange rates and 0.2% on debit. Of course that's just the raw interchange fee; a small merchant has to pay more than that to its card processor, but there are all-inclusive, Square-like offers for debit card processing fees below 1% for small merchants, and larger ones manage to keep both debit and credit processing cost way below 1%.
So the "comfort" of being able to hand over your credit card to someone who takes it out of view and possibly does unauthorized stuff with it increases prices of all the stuff you buy by roughly 2-3%.
The speed of it is quick, and it also gives a good chance for wrapping things up (can we get this packed, thank-yous, goodbyes if it's a bigger group, etc).
Of course, it may also help that we have chip-and-pin and tap pretty universally, so we rarely hand our card over to anyone - having the server take the card is incredibly strange for me when I'm down in the US.
In the EU, you ask for the bill, they bring you the bill and the credit card machine, and you are charged right there at the table, where you have to sign (because you have an US Credit Card after all)
Actually it's kind of funny when you visit remote places in Europe, and the proprietors are confused because this is the first time they've rang up a US Credit card, and the machine spits out a second receipt asking them to validate the signature.
In the American model, payment is processed away from the customer and the bill is left for tip-adding after the server has left, to save the sensitibilities of cheap customers who tip badly.
Also, I thought tipping itself isn't necessary, as many european countries have social programs to offset low wages.
Imagine going out with some clients and getting "insufficient funds" notice what an embarrassment that would be...the waiter acts as a buffer or could in some cases get your attention.
But your definitely right from a security perspective and privacy this is much better...other than the insane fees they collect :)
I don't. I creates an opportunity for credit card skimming.
And finally, I don't know if a skimmer has been added to the device by previous customers. It is left on the table.
[1] General neutral term for waiter/waitress.
Or, if you don't want to sound like you are describing a robot using a term Merriam-Webster describes as “vaguely disparaging” [0], you could use the gender neutral term almost universally used in the industry, “server”.
I know Clover has a similar terminal that I've seen used in restaurants around Seattle, and if you go to a restaurant outside of the US, you'd likely see what's being proposed here.
Tipping isn't bribery. If your barista is making your coffee differently based on a tip, they're a bad barista.
So the advertised cost would actually be the honest that you would pay for the product. What a horrible world that would be!
Summary of relevant research: https://www.epi.org/blog/seven-facts-about-tipped-workers-an...
In particular, point 5 from the linked summary makes a strong case that a significant portion of workers making the tipped minimum wage do not receive the difference from their employers.
(I tip, but that’s no excuse for someone else to suffer social pressure.)
Basically you have an item, and within that item there are variations (like different SKUs). Items can also have modifiers that apply to that particular item, and these are multiple choice. So you'd have a burger item say, where the variations are beef or veggie. Then you'd have modifiers like lettuce, tomato, onion, etc. Modifiers can have a cost or be free, different variations have a price.
You can also apply discounts which are like items that affect your total as a whole or the price of specific other items.
I'm really excited about Stripe Terminal as a developer, and I think they can eat Square's lunch by focusing on purely being the payment intermediary and letting 3rd parties develop solutions around their SDK (which supports web browsers in addition to mobile platforms, unlike Square which only supports iOS and Android and just recently divorced itself from requiring the Square app too).
You misunderstand what strengths Square and Stripe both have. Stripe is a pure API/SDK that integrates with third-parties for everything other than payments.
Square has all those "third-parties" services bundled in to make it a much smoother experience for merchants. Payroll? Analytics? Dashboard? Everything is right there for you at Square. Stripe? They just link you to a bunch of third party sources.
Ultimately it boils down to: Stripe is geared towards more tech-savvy customers or those who can afford development costs for all these custom integrations + working with 3rd parties. Square is geared towards people who want it all in one ecosystem and don't need a lot of customization.
Stripe won't "eat" Square's lunch when it comes down to the base use-case of a simple merchant wanting an easy onboarding experience and taking payments. Stripe is anything but that. And for larger merchants you have to worry about what third-party services you integrate with Stripe - what if one of them goes under? Switching third-party services might be a huge pain. You don't have to worry about that with Square. Not to mention that first-party services always are better than third-party services. Square can always come up with better services to offer its customers because it has access to all the data. Third-party services are limited to what they can get via an API.
And as of right now, Square is actually beating Stripe on the SDK game with the release of ReaderSDK.
That could be because I'm using a cellular internet conneciton however. My town's cable internet is notoriously throttled.
Here in Canada, chip terminals often show 'PIN OK' - meaning that the local part of the transaction has been completed - within 1 second but then need 10+ seconds to communicate back to the payment processor.
https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-makes-payments-even-...
EDIT:
Square’s 2017Q4 net revenue is about $600 million dollars, CVS’s 2017Q4 net revenue is about $48 billion dollars. Assuming the retail 2.5% transaction fee, CVS paid $1.2 billion dollars of credit card fees in 2017Q4, approximately double Square’s total revenue for that period.
Square would be very wise to take note of CVS’s failure in the QRcode payment app market, given that CVS generates twice their total net revenue in processing fees alone.
Contracts are routinely over 5 figures, so 2.6% ends up being quite a big cut just to accepts credit. I suppose a ~2.6% fee could be added, but that still leaves exposure to chargebacks. Does anyone here have experience using square with large payment amounts?
As a customer, I can attest to this. The hassle of paying by check (I’ve had checks stolen and abused, plus I don’t keep them handy any more) or (perish the thought) cash for more than a couple hundred dollars is not worth it to me. I will seek out the next-most-trusted contractor who does accept cards and use that person.
It's a shame because basically everyone except the US has moved on to chip+pin, and the US will transition in the next few years, so this product won't be around for long.
2.6% + fixed fee seems to me mildly high for a card in the reader + pin entered type of solution. Also chargebacks should be ridiculously rare in this setting.