Square Is Stepping It Up

Square Inc., The payment processing company best known for its credit card readers that fit in the palm of your hard, is taking its business online.  

Square offer merchants point-of-sale credit card payments that are cheaper and replace card-processing equipment with a tablet computer or a smartphone. The 2.75% rate per transaction is particularly attractive to smaller establishments like food trucks and the mom-and-pop shops of the world.  

Pitting itself against PayPal, the Company is taking the steps to start taking payments over the Web.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Square’s new effort will allow merchants to list their products online on a website hosted by Square, which will also process the payments. PayPal, meanwhile, has been targeting new ways to process payments in physical stores, including its own card reader. 

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“There’s a blurring of the lines between offline and online commerce,” said Square’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey. “This is the next obvious step for us.”

Squares new venture will help mom-and-pop shops reach customers outside the neighborhood which helps businesses position themselves for stronger growth.

To accompany this new feature, Square will offer Square Market, a data tool to help businesses analyze their business based on the new online effort. Over time, the Company may offer to sell more data and analysis to merchants according to Dorsey.

PayPal has been moving in on Squares proverbial turf, with the launch of its own mobile card reader, PayPal Here. The initiative is the same as Squares, merchants swap out cash registers to be replaced by smartphones and tablet computers. PayPal has even pushed to implement PayPal Here in larger retailers like Home Depot.

“When you’re successful at something, others try to follow you,” said Hill Ferguson, PayPal vice president of global product. “We feel good about our position.”

Square has successfully cornered the market in mobile processing solutions, with millions of merchants using the quarter-sized credit card reader on a daily basis, where PayPal is said to have fewer than 1 million users of PayPal Here.