Mobile Payment Device, Square Has Competition with PayPal

By now, we’re all familiar with Square (www.squareup.com), the little mobile payment device that plugs into the headphone jack of your smartphone. It revolutionized the way merchants accepted mobile payments. It’s as easy as plug-n-go. We even featured the company in the last Legit Print blog post, “Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies and Legit Print’s Top 5 Underdogs“.

PayPal Here’s Cut-Throat Competition Against Square

Well, Square, founded by Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey (@Jack), has some serious competition from well-known merchant company PayPal. Today, PayPal released their PayPal Here product in San Francisco. Much like the Square, the PayPal Here is a blue plastic triangle that plugs into the headphone jack of your smartphone. By offering game-changing features such as encrypted payments, the PayPal Here seems to have an edge over the Square device. The PayPal Here is also at an advantage because it already has a pool of clients that have PayPal accounts, not to mention their brand recognition.

PayPal Here rates of 2.7 percent per transaction present a cut-throat competition against Square rates of 2.75 percent.

Will Square continue to prosper over PayPal in the mobile payment market? Did PayPal enter this market too late? How will their battle affect merchants? It’ll be interesting to see how this competition pans out!

Do you think Legit Print should start accepting PayPal payments? We haven’t really seen a demand for it since our customers have no problem entering their payment information on our secure website. We currently use Authorize.net, as millions of other businesses do. If you think PayPal would be beneficial for us, and for you as our customers, please let us know.