Mobile payments start up Square has been gaining steam and it announced today the Square Register, a new tool aimed to ease the process of paying for items and for merchants to organize menus, sales and receipts.
Square CEO Jack Dorsey announced at TechCrunch Disrupt the Square Register and Card Case, designed to make real world buying like a one-click Internet purchase, a la Amazon or iTunes. Imagine the ability to basically have a bar tab at your favorite merchants via your smartphone. Walk up, order a coffee and say “charge it to Dan.” The Square Card Case interacts with the Square Register, the coffee is paid for and sends a receipt to your device. In his presentation, Dorsey said multiple times he thinks this is going to make mobile purchasing “magical.”
“Think about how you pay for something online,” Dorsey said. “Say Amazon or iTunes. You go to the store, you enter your credit card information and then after that you just choose what you want and it is a one-click purchase … It is not all that different an idea from going to your neighborhood bar and handing over your credit card and opening up a tab.”
The Square Card Case will be rolled out to 50 merchants across St. Louis, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. How it works is that for each merchant the Square mobile application will create a card specific to the retailer that is stored in your phone. It can connect with the Square Register to make payments, send receipts and update menus in real time. Square will also have a directory of merchants where cards are available and have the Square Register.
“Get rid of the receipts, get rid of all this mess and replace it with one clean digital card,” Dorsey said.
The merchant cards will have names and logos of the retailer on one side. It can be flipped to show a map with a location of the retailer and everything they sell updated from the Square Register. It also provides analytics to see what the top selling item is at the time. The register will send a receipt to the card with all the pertinent information – items purchases, time and date. Want to know how many coffees you purchased from a specific site this year? The card should be able to show your entire purchasing history.
“It has everything that you have purchased, all the way back in time,” Dorsey said. “No other company in the world has this information.”
Square also announced that it has shipped 500,000 card readers and has done one million transactions in May to the tune of $3 million in processing per day. The company is now on track to process $1 billion in transactions within a year.
