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Square Processing $2B In Payments Per Year (techcrunch.com)
49 points by garydevenay on Oct 10, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments


Has anyone heard any rumors about when Square is going to release 1.0 of their android API.

I'm building a POS into some tablet based software my company sells, and I'd really like to do microtransactions without the $0.30 fee per transaction.


Google Payments (https://checkout.google.com/inapppayments/) has no transaction fee, just a flat 5%.


Thanks for the suggestion, but I need something that will work with a card swiper and do card-present transactions.


Impressive, but does it make sense to measure things per yer on a 2 year old company? I'd be interested in a more granular breakdown and how/if market cycles effect them in the same way it does retailers in general.


Wonder what portion of the $2B in transactions are those that come under $6 on which, Square actually loses money. Also, it averages $2500 per merchant, which seems that these are low volume merchants, and unlikely that Square has recouped their merchant setup costs yet. Transaction volume has to still improve significantly before Square will find itself in the black. Yet, much kudos to a true disruptor.


So that's at least $55mm/revenue PA.


Limited to the US market unless they do a chip and PIN reader.


Possibly of interest: http://izettle.com/


Square does an amazing job at solving both a hardware and a software problem in just 2 and half years. Pretty impressive.


I have not interacted with Square at all... not in any store or online presence that I have seen.... Where are they?


I seem to think that they are used by smaller or personal organisations (that's what I think they would be ideal for anyway). So maybe a lot of trades-people and freelances could be utilising their service.


"Rabois says that Square’s merchants now represent 10 percent of the transactions in the Visa/MasterCard world."

This is either a) completely untrue, or b) a clever play on words (I don't know what "Square's merchants" means)

800k card readers shipped is significant and would be about 10% of the total companies that take credit cards, but the vast majority of those with readers are not actually companies (I have gotten several of them in the mail... saying "card readers shipped" is like AOL talking about how many CD's or disks they gave out in the 90's)

There are ~56Billion visa/mc credit and debit card transactions per year, if anyone was interested. (taken from Visa/MC 10-k's)... and a total of $3.5Trillion in transaction volume


I would guess it was (a) because the store doesn't have that line anymore. Now it says: "Rabois says that Square’s merchants are now 10% of the reach of the Visa/MasterCard world."


I believe they are calculating the 10% based off of registered users this time around vs card readers in the past.




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