In addition to betting big on the upcoming change in credit card tech, mobile payment pioneer Square is also wagering millions of dollars, literally, on the food delivery services that are booming on mobile. The company has announced its acquisition of Caviar, a curated food delivery platform, reportedly for $90 million in stock. Caviar aims to set itself apart from other standard delivery apps by enabling ordering from restaurants that normally don’t offer delivery service. As on-the-go payment continues to grow, tapping into different sections of the consumer market is crucial to the development of Square, and incorporating mobile food ordering into its payment system is most likely just the first step.
Tag: Mobile payment
Twitter Acquires CardSpring, Moves In On E-Commerce
Right after Facebook began testing a Buy button that enables its users to make purchases straight from their News Feeds, Twitter strikes back with the news that it has acquired CardSpring, a mobile payment start-up whose platform could let developers build credit card-linked offers such as electronic coupons, loyalty cards, and virtual currencies. With this acquisition, Twitter is no doubt betting on its mass platform, with its innate blurb-y style and targeted hashtags, to effectively distribute those integrated offers. In this tight race towards social e-commence dominance, this move might just give Twitter a little edge over Facebook.
Square Pulls Wallet In Favor Of Order App
The highly-touted Square Wallet isn’t working out so well, it turns out. After its launch in 2011, and support from Starbucks, the Wallet ultimately didn’t match the momentum of the company’s credit card reader, which has been a veritable success with small businesses. To match the success of the card reader, Square wants to overhaul its consumer strategy, replacing Square Wallet with Square Order, a simplified version of the Wallet that’s been in testing for a few months.
Order lets users order ahead at small businesses, and skip lines when you pick up your purchase. It also notifies users when their orders are ready. The added utility aims to attract new users as Square is baking in loyalty program and advertising opportunities which will warrant a substantially larger merchant fee of 8%. In general, Square’s issues have been more around their business model than user experience, so well see if Order will right the ship.
Reports Suggest Apple Will Enter Mobile Payments Space
According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is looking to expand its presence into the mobile-payments space as Apple’s senior vice-president, Eddy Cue, has begun making inquiries into the possibility of Apple handling payments for physical goods and services. Though services like Square, PayPal and Stripe have dominated the space thus far, Apple’s note-worthy lack of NFC adoption has always meant that they’d have to come up with their own technology or their own software solutions. They tried – and largely failed – with Passbook, much like Google Wallet, but the iTunes store has a cache of over 400 million credit card accounts that are active, so if Apple can figure out a good method to leverage this wealth of knowledge, it could become a major player in the mobile payments space very quickly. With the combination of TouchID to verify users’ identities, and the new iBeacon BLE technology, Apple may have already laid the foundations, technologically speaking. Knowing Apple, they’ll take some time to put all of the pieces together, but when they do it could be a very potent medium.
Loop Allows Mobile Payments With Any Credit Card Hardware
Mobile payments technology has been slow to reach mainstream acceptance, partially because of the ubiquity of credit card readers and the sluggishness of the industry to respond to change. A new startup, Loop, believes it has solved a major part of the problem by developing a dongle for smartphones that will facilitate payments via mobile and which is compatible with about 90% of existing credit card swiping systems. The dongle works by creating a changing magnetic field to mock the magnetic information received by the read head of a card swiper. The user experience is smoother than the one offered by other mobile payments solutions as well, allowing users to simply swipe their cards to add them to their virtual wallet, as long as the names on the cards match the name on the user’s verified Loop account. Improving ease of use for both users and vendors is critical to bringing mobile payments to the mainstream, and Loop’s first steps towards this end could be the initial push needed to get there.
McDonalds Tests Mobile Payment App
As if fast food weren’t fast enough already, McDonalds is looking to speed the process up even further. In new tests in Salt Lake City and Austin, the fast food chain is testing a mobile payment app that would allow customers to order and pay for their meal before picking it up. Aimed at teens, the program will feature side order promotions, affiliated sponsor offers, and a loyalty program, much like the already-implemented system at Chipotle. Whether branded payment apps are a sustainable trend remains to be seen, but for the meantime it’s clear that brands are trying their best to get at customers on their mobile devices.
PayPal Testing Face Verification
The mobile payments app is reportedly testing face-verification for its mobile payment transactions. There’s a tab labeled “Local,” that allows users to find nearby stores that accept PayPal payments – as well as check into venues online that thereafter displays their name and photo in the PayPal app. Store owners can use the app to pay for things, and cashiers can use profile photos to check the identity of the customer. Though PayPal is marketing this as a more “personalized” shopping experience, some are worried about the privacy implications of such a “Minority Report” like system. Useful or overstepping bounds? We’ll have to wait and see what backlash, if any, results.
Mobile Payments To Top $1 Billion in 2013
Although the mobile payments market is growing slower than projected, eMarketer nonetheless predicts that mobile payments in the US will break the $1 Billion mark this year – and then shoot up to $58 Billion by 2017. The report defines mobile payments as “transactions for goods or services made by scanning, tapping, swiping, or checking in with a mobile phone at the point o sale,” which differs from mobile commerce – defined as purchasing items on a mobile device. Those sales will hit $34 Billion this year. Mobile payments stalled this year due to the “congested landscape of competing technologies,” that will check its growth until about 2016, when eMarketer predicts a consolidation that will allow the medium to take off.
Mobile Shopping On The Rise Among Affluent Consumers
Mobile shopping is taking off among affluent consumers according to a recent study from eMarketer. Stating convenience as the main driver, affluent shoppers who have purchased on mobile increased from 23% in 2011 to 51% in 2012. Shopping apps have certainly aided this surge, but we can’t forget mobile payments for in-store items as well. Both activities place the phone at the center of commerce.
Netverify Wants to Check Your ID
Mobile payments company Jumio has brought their desktop app, Netverify, to mobile today, giving app developers the tools needed to verify user identities by simply photographing a driver’s license or passport. Pricing is a bit steep at $2 per scan, but that could be money well spent for certain marketplaces to quickly verify users to deliver sensitive or personalized content, or to auto-fill form fields for the purpose of making transactions. In any case, the benefits for companies and consumers alike are great – reducing online fraud, and speeding the process of making transactions from mobile devices.
