>painful transition
How painful could it possibly be to go and buy a new card reader? Why doesn't the payments provider offer them as part of the service? They are not so expensive.
How painful could it possibly be to go and buy a new card reader? Why doesn't the payments provider offer them as part of the service? They are not so expensive.
It's not like this is an investment that will lead to more customers or new revenue, this is a big expense just to stay afloat. Getting financing for such an expenditure is extremely difficult. At least in a mixed ecosystem you might be able to recoup some of the cost selling your old equipment, but no one's going to buy it if it's going to stop working soon.
This seems to be universal in Australia. Even the mega store self serve integrated systems have a separate machine mounted on for processing card payments.
And even if you can hotswap a POS system, they're still expensive. A machine plus software is about $4000 per lane, and that's when you're not a captive market. Even small retailers typically have enough lanes that this is a significant expense. People in this thread are giving prices for Square readers which 1) are not at all sufficient for most businesses and 2) are sold at a loss while Square makes its money on transaction fees and subscription services (the same is true for the rest of the Square clones). It's like comparing a home projector to a movie theater projector.