It's a trap. You, owner of a shop, don't do this.<p>Amazon will first analyze all your sales data, they will than attach reviews to your shop and finally they will oblige you to play by their rules or die (banned or killed by bad reviews) and either way they will grow thanks to your hard work.<p>I'm not joking, this is exactly what they have done (and keep doing) with "partners". Amazon is all but transparent and it has been growing like crazy during the last 6-8 years thanks to this exact strategy. Online is not enough anymore, they need to conquer local stores as well. The empire strikes back.
Think of Amazon's role as an online merchant: they've built a 3rd party merchant system where other folks can use Amazon's retail and distribution. Then, they gathered centralized data of what sells, at what prices. They stepped in and started carrying more profitable items themselves.<p>Now, look at their role here: if this takes off, they'll have data on what merchants are selling, for how much, and to whom. These are items that Amazon wouldn't normally get sales data on because people choose local vendors instead.<p>If Amazon wanted to start pushing more into local markets (or different kinds of products), they can make a fortune off this data, and that's why they can afford to undercut companies like Square. It's a long term play.
This sounds a little like a joke.<p>Amazon is the biggest competitor brick-and-mortar shops have ever seen; why would shops want to give that kind of information to Amazon, so that it knows in real time what people are buying outside of itself???<p>A coffeeshop, maybe, but for any other kind of business it sounds crazy.
People seem to be very confused at to who the target market is here. This isn't about bricks-and-mortar retailers switching to use Amazon as a payment mechanism, it's about providing a payment services for the (largely) local service vendors who sell their services via Amazon Local (Amazon's daily deal platform).<p>Powering the payments system will give Amazon the data to do far more dynamic pricing (something which they have a lot of expertise in) for their vendors on Amazon Local which is a win for both the vendors and Amazon.
The rate at which Amazon is rolling out products is nothing short of dizzying. Reminds me of Google before Larry came back and retook the reigns. Inevitably they will come to a point where they start shutting down a subset of their enormous product line. It was one thing to have google wave or reader dropped, but when amazon kills some of these lines it'll affect people in real ways. And it will happen.<p>Here is for hoping they eventually focus on making their products better instead of constantly making new ones. Even look at AWS. I would struggle to name 80% of the services under that umbrella in under a minute.
Can someone explain why manually keyed transactions cost more than swipes? I'm thinking there's more risk involved with those or something along those lines.
I'm interested to see how the "manufactured spent / churning" crowd will use this. There are credit cards with 2% (fidelity amex) or 2.2% (barlays arrival plus) cashback out there.<p>Having a 1.75% fee on this will probably have some of them experiment :)<p>I'm sure Amazon will shut that down, but I'd love to see how much spent people can run up before that happens.
Wow, talk about doing a deal with the devil. Amazon will just apply their standard rule book to the situation and choke the market, and use the data to make it easier to determine what markets are worth investing in for hyperlocal sales tools.<p>It honestly seems like no good can come of this, it looks like a wonderful tool, but the risks? Eeesh.
We sold them the localregister.com platform over 12 months ago after 7 years of development. They are going to crush it as they have with scale, speed and everything that makes amazon, amazon. It helped put our Contrib, Domain Holdings and Global Ventures companies into a great position with future integration of our customers using the currency movement system. They will eventually integrate across all platforms quickly starting with localregister.com. Gotta love competition, makes our world great
As a consumer, I'm hoping this makes it easier to find local services. There are a number of options, but none are great.<p>Angie's List has mediocre search and an awkward interface. Craigslist can be great, but it's more often wading through a cesspool of spam and shady companies to find the few decent ones. Yelp seems to have pretty good reviews for restaurants, but not much else.
Interesting to consider in tandem with AmazonSupply - a much bigger play for businesses, and one you hear very very little about. You can (and I'm sure they'd prefer that you do) use your Amazon Local Register proceeds to buy most of what you need to run your business. (Leaving aside restaurants/cafes – outside of AmazonFresh delivery markets anyway.)<p><a href="http://www.amazonsupply.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazonsupply.com/</a><p>Forbes had a pretty extensive look a couple months back, the only big public airing it's gotten - <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/05/07/amazons-wholesale-slaughter-jeff-bezos-8-trillion-b2b-bet/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/05/07/amazons-...</a>
This is not (only) about putting local retailers out of business; it's about conquering consumer's wallet. In fact it'd be better for them if (most) of Amazon Local users do not go out of business.<p>Having access to consumer spend outside their platform would give Amazon an incredible leverage. They'd be able to understand where else you're spending your money, which would allow all sorts of revenue streams: up-selling, cross-selling, Amazon Deals, advertising revenue, selling the raw data to data management platforms (e.g., BluaKai).<p>They already do something similar with Amazon Payments, but it's mostly for online merchants. This can go much further, even to industries that they have no interest in entering. If you're paying a plumber or a painter, you may be interested in decoration. If you're buying a bicycle, you may need a helmet. Buy some baby clothes, and you may be expecting, and the perfect target for Amazon Mom (I hate this name; why not Amazon Baby, or Amazon Parents?).<p>And let's not forget about the revenue coming from selling your data and your cookies, which they already do with advertising partners. While banks and card issuers have been doing this for decades, they are typically clueless about how to reach to consumers other than via direct mail, or co-branded email catalogs. And matching PII and databases is something that the FTC doesn't like much.<p>It's brilliant move for them.
1.75% limited of time offer makes me want to vomit. The one thing I like about Square is at least they're not like other CC processors that make the careers HIDING fees from their merchants. Now Amazon is coming out the gate doing this. Many of us are fighting these fees online - even the CC processors like Stripe are at least straightforward with their fees even if they're forced to make them higher than they'd like - but it looks like for in person swipes we're stuck with the status quo.
The awesome Brian Roemmele announced this on Quora two weeks ago: <a href="http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Quora-News-Before-It-Happens-Amazon-To-Compete-Head-To-Head-With-Square" rel="nofollow">http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Quora-News-Before-It-Happ...</a><p>Exciting times, to see what unfolds in this payment war. Apple will certainly get there soon: <a href="http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Apple%E2%80%99s-iWallet-And-Retail-Payments-Plans-Have-Been-Exposed-In-A-New-Patent" rel="nofollow">http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Apple%E2%80%99s-iWallet-A...</a><p><a href="http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Confirmed-Apple-iPhone-Event-On-September-9th-2014" rel="nofollow">http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Confirmed-Apple-iPhone-Ev...</a><p><a href="http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Apple-Patent-Shows-How-Passbook-Becomes-The-iWallet" rel="nofollow">http://acceptingpayments.quora.com/Apple-Patent-Shows-How-Pa...</a>
[1]"Make sure the microphone on your device is turned on".<p>I am not familiar with the card reader hardware. Why is a microphone needed for processing a credit card swipe?<p>[1] - <a href="http://localregister.amazon.com/help/201549190/swiping-a-card" rel="nofollow">http://localregister.amazon.com/help/201549190/swiping-a-car...</a>
Does anyone know how this could integrate with QuickBooks? We currently use Quickbooks Point of Sale to run the cash register and inventory and it loads into the QuickBooks company file each night.<p>I'd love to switch to something like this but I'm not really clear on how the accounting would work.
"Pricing you can trust" rarely comes along with "LOW LOW PRICES IF YOU COMMIT NOW!" In fact, the combination of these two concepts in one ad campaign should double-red-flag this "opportunity".
Unfortunately, the reality is that small business and service providers will use this service because they won't realize that the long term implications of this Amazon move will work against them. For them, everything is short term (swipe fees, reporting, etc.), and when we are talking about the "future them" that is "someone else" 10 years from now.<p>This is really the prisoner's dilemma with thousands and thousands of prisoners.<p>Alternatively, it is the frog inside the boiling water. The frog never jumps out of the water. It just dies.
I guess maybe it saves some on TLS processing, but it's lame that I have to click through two screens to even <i>start</i> signing up. Especially since I'm already signed into Amazon!
What is it with swipe cards in the US? A lot of businesses in the EU don't take them due to security risks and only accept chip-and-pin payments,yet US parties like it's 1991?
I'm guessing the product roadmap looks something like: Point of Sale -> Inventory Management -> All of your physical inventory is also available for purchase on Amazon.com<p>Brilliant.
In a typical Scorpion manner (<a href="http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/07/amazons-scorpion-problem.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/07/amazons-scorpion-proble...</a>), they are going in for the kill.
Another card reader that plugs into the audio port.<p>I'd like to include one of these card readers into my own mobile app; has anyone had success using an SDK for integration? CardFlight seems like it would work, but it's a bit expensive...
I don't get this. Seems like a late entry into a saturated and (at least in Square's case) not that lucrative market. Any insight into why you would do this?
Ah, more 90's payment technology from the US. It's becoming a bit of a running joke. (Also, extremely annoying when you live in a city with lots of American tourists that think you can still pay that way in 2014.)<p>Why on earth would you still develop new services for something that is so outdated and has been so completely broken and discredited even my 72 year old mother knows it's unsafe?
LocalRegister.com to amazon was a great transaction for our team at Domain Holdings and Global Ventures. We are glad we can finally analyze this transaction and show others how key your url asset is and the potential technology and business models still to come for the domain channel.. Check out Contrib or BidTellect, two other up and coming platforms in good hands with big announcements soon.
They did not even bother to create some unique design of a landing page [1], just copied it from SquareUp [2] -> PayPal [3] pages:<p>1. <a href="http://localregister.amazon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://localregister.amazon.com/</a><p>2. <a href="https://squareup.com/" rel="nofollow">https://squareup.com/</a><p>3. <a href="https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader" rel="nofollow">https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader</a>