The pricing makes very little sense to me...Square already sells Business in a Box for $250 with a cash drawer and $500 if you want a receipt printer. This stand costs six times as much as similar options (<a href="http://amzn.to/102UtKn" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.to/102UtKn</a>) and the only real improvement is the long track.<p>If you've ever spent a day swiping credit cards with a Square reader, though, that long track will look mighty attractive...<p>The market for this: trendy premium SF coffee shops.
What an absolutely brilliant & simple move by Square. POS register systems are a huge, costly market and this is an incredibly attractive option, esp at that price - talk about disruption! Nice job guys!
That white clean look is going to start looking disgusting once it gets use in the real world. I see them imitating apple's design aesthetic, but they really should have learned from the white macbook - because this is going to be worse. Cash registers are already always dirty, because there's high transaction volume there - it's literally the bottleneck. Now it's white and pretty looking, so it'll draw your eye, which basically requires every business who gets the square stand to give it a good clean daily.
I'm not sure who this is for. Square originated as a simple way for individuals and very small businesses to take credit without a massive investment. Evidently, businesses also took interest in such a product.<p>However, a $300 kiosk is probably out of the realm of possibility for many one-man operations. At the same time, the business demographic to which they are appealing with this (larger established businesses that need a physically-integrated register solution) is already competed over by a plethora of companies.<p>The whole point of Square was to occupy the niche of hyper-small operations and forsake the market for large businesses. Not only are they competing with the established companies like Verafone, but also with the dozen or so other companies that target larger businesses with iPad register solutions. I'm not sure if they will be able to compete.<p>That's not to say that this will be unsuccessful. Obviously, Square has had some success in penetrating the large-business market. I don't know. Maybe Starbucks will buy 10,000 of them or something. It just seems like a more volatile and crowded market...
I'm a bit surprised they went for that cheesy white plastic look. That seems like it would stand out in most retail stores. Stainless or black is much more appropriate.
A stand? That's not what they need to go mass market.<p>When I show people the square dongle on my phone, the first thing most people ask is... "OK, that's cool, but how can it accept cash"?<p>If their communication is not really simple & clear about how they can be a "total" solution for a small business (which yes, must also take cash + CC's), then they will not get to mass market. Having more hardware (which is far harder to scale than software) will not be the best path.<p>That said, I'm still impressed with Square, as it's very hard to compete in a non-level playing field with huge entrenched players (Visa/MC/AMEX + big POS players), and the ecosystem needs successful upstarts to freshen the ecosystem for consumers.
The swivel and the ability to bolt it to the counter appear to be very well designed, but I would personally have a hard time dropping $300 on it after buying an iPad for $400 - $500.
So you swipe the card? I haven't seen a cash registry where you need to swipe in ages. I understand the cost implications but it seems really ancient not to use the chip.
Square should admit that their real purpose is to track the customer without their direct permission and sell the data to the highest bidder.<p>Square is for morons who love Facebook profiling coz it's free.