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Square Register
- taitems 15y agoI love Square's work to date. The way they've changed the retail and hospitality industry for the better, and looking damn good while doing so. That being said, I can't say I'm a huge fan of the Register icon. Even the Card Case icon is strobing a bit on this monitor.
- andyfleming 15y agoAgreed. It doesn't really communicate anything about the application. It has the square logo, but those colored squares could be anything. Items or inventory aren't what come to mind. The app looks cool though.
- mycodebreaks 15y agoWe need such innovation (at any level - design, engineering, technology) Keep it up guys!
- andyfleming 15y agoAwesome to see Square continuing to progress forward on a regular basis! The register app looks great! Does anyone know if it works well (or at all) with multiple iPads? Can you view/manage the inventory online?
- tricolon 15y agoOne piece is missing: a much more robust card reader that doesn't swivel or threaten to snap in two after a day of swiping.
- alibosworth 15y agoIt seems trivial to connect the reader via a TRRS [1] extension cable Any cable that maintains mic capability with stock Apple headphones should be fine. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=658&q=trrs&gbv=2&oq=trrs https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=...
- underwater 15y agoI saw a poor barista trying dozens of times to make the reader accept a card the other day (Square + iPad, not sure if they were using this exact set up). It got quite violent. The scanner does really seem to be far too flimsy to be the primary payment mechanism in a busy business.
- bergie 15y agoThis will hopefully become less of an issue once NFC payments take off
- underwater 15y agoTrue. I used Square's NFC-like Card Case app at the same coffee shop and the experience was much better. It was a little disconcerting to complete a transaction without an physically action like a swipe or button press though.
- modeless 15y agoI noticed a local business (Blue Moon Burgers) using iPads as registers, using similarly flimsy (though not Square) card readers. They gave up after a few months and switched to a traditional POS setup. I don't know whether it was the card readers that were to blame, but I'm guessing they were part of it.
- callumjones 15y agoIt's great to see a company taking an existing product (iPad) and building on top of it's powerful software and hardware. Instead of stores having to buy some expensive & clunky cash register or crazy expensive PoS solution; they can pop down to their local Apple or electronics store & buy a future PoS device. It's very powerful when anyone can start accepting payments by just popping down to their local electronics store.
- kwamenum86 15y agoThis could be a game changer. Restuarant management software is a space that needs innovation as well - I'd be surprised if they don't roll something out that incorporates both payments and reservations.
- sriramk 15y agoSlightly tangential note - Square has the most gorgeous product videos I've seen from a startup. Their jobs section even lists an open position for doing these so I guess they do them in house. Very impressive.
- zbrock 15y agoThank you! Our in house video team is pretty awesome.
- kmfrk 15y agoiZettle are eerily similar in that they have - what looks like - great UI design and promotional videos as well. Shame they require you to have a Facebook account to sign up as a user. https://www.izettle.com/ https://www.izettle.com/
- BCounsell 15y agoI'm drawing up a design to make them a better stand. What they have just looks like it's waiting to get pushed off a counter. They are only a few blocks away, I could just drop it off.
- dmix 15y agoIs it not just the iPad software and the card reader they are selling? I thought the stand was for demonstration. The video shows a different stand than the homepage pic.
- learc83 15y agoI really wish they would work on pushing a final version of their API.
- geuis 15y agoI would love to see a slight modification to the design of their reader hardware. Keep the audio interface, obviously. But design a small plastic frame that the reader can fit into that fits flush against the edge of the top of the iPad/iPhone. Make it a bit longer with slightly sloped internal edges so that its easier to guide a credit card to the scanner. This will also have the benefit keeping the reader from swiveling around while in use. Actually sounds like a Kickstarter project if Square doesn't come out with it themselves soon.
- sans-serif 15y agoMount the reader separately, and connect it to the iPad with an audio cable.
- Valid 15y agoI wonder if they plan to open a web store interface, so users can purchase things without an iPad... I've been looking for a sexy place to set up shop, but my business doesn't have walk-in customers. I know that's not really square's game though
- craigmccaskill 15y agoThe Application looks amazing. Well done. What I do wonder though, is why they're shipping this with such a terrible stand/card reader attachment? I can't see those lasting 6 months in a busy shop environment. I'd like to see a swivel stand that's locked to the counter which you can slide the ipad into, then bolt secure and lock with a key. While you're at it, build a robust card reader into the side of the case. Basically something similar in form factor to this: http://www.directindustry.com/prod/elo-touchsystems/touch-screen-monitors-with-card-reader-9044-121138.html http://www.directindustry.com/prod/elo-touchsystems/touch-sc... I could probably put something like that together in a weekend with a trip to fry's/home depot, but why should I have to? Also, a question I'd have before using this - what happens in the event of a software crash? Where is my data, how quickly does stuff get backed up online?
- maxmcd 15y agoMost likely because a lot of their business relies on easily being able to provide a ton of people with free card readers. I'm sure they've explored a more robust option, but it's probably nowhere near as cheap as the current model. Maybe a paid upgrade card reader is the next step, but if their goal is broad, cheap and easy distribution they'll probably be shipping with this model for a long time.
- craigmccaskill 15y agoI'm not suggesting this is free, by any means. However, given the cost of buying existing POS hardware solutions, I'm confident I could handcraft bespoke ipad cases with card readers, sell them an ipad and still make a profit, all while undercutting a more traditional setup.
- madmath 15y agoAgreed with the paid upgrade. Businesses are ready to pay for such things, especially when they bought a $500 iPad just for the purpose... what's $15 on a card reader? As was suggested, a cheap and free reader as well as a paid upgrade would work well I think. Overall great product, and demo video!
- kefs 15y agoI don't like how, as the customer, I have no way of seeing what exactly is being charged to my card. For all I know, anything could be running on that ipad (foreground or background) and i could be charged any amount without knowing. Sure, I can ask for a receipt, but even the legacy till they replace in the video has a customer facing display, not a shiny piece of aluminum with some fruit. It's interesting that video never switches to the customer view either.
- bdon 15y agoHow is this any different than a traditional POS? The only exceptions would be cash registers with pole displays, which are limited to big box retailers that can afford them.
- kefs 15y agoNot sure about where you're at, but it's a rarity to come across a register that doesn't have a customer facing display, with at the very least, the total you are being charged for your goods and/or services.
- jahmed 15y agoMany small shops have a separate credit card terminal where they enter the amount to be charged.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- bdon 15y agoFrom a cursory google image search it looks like you're right, I suppose my routine skews towards merchants that don't have one of those.
- HappyH 15y agoNot sure about where you're at
- pbreit 15y ago
- fufulabs 15y agoNo other startup has ever been so primed for an Apple acquisition. Everything from execution, design sensibility, culture and even CEO is heavily Apple inspired but in a different but still complementary industry.
- rsuttongee 15y agoYeah, except for the fact that both Jack Dorsey and Keith Rabois are both already horrendously wealthy and almost certainly have no interest in being acquired.
- tjogin 15y agoSquare and Apple seems like a great cultural fit. But I don't think there is a snowball's chance in hell Apple is even mildly interested in acquiring them, as it would make zero business sense to do so. And the feeling is probably mutual.
- zbowling 15y agoI don't know about that yet. Mobile payments is a hot category. While some are looking at it from the perspective of using your cell phone to make purchases, square is looking at it in the reverse. It's probably the best positioned POS system ever for the long tail that doesn't have or want a traditional POS terminal. To Apple is could be a resource to entering the iPad as the defacto kiosk to all things touch market.
- physcab 15y agoThat would be an almost funny turn of events. My neighbor is a recruiter at Square and I'm 100% positive that they try to recruit exclusively out of Apple's hardware teams. These are the people that are looking for their next win and already know their way around the China factories where the Square's are made.
- yalogin 15y agoSquare is a POS, cash register company. Why would Apple be interested in it?
- xianshou 15y agoI just stopped in at a coffee shop in the middle of Philly the other day using Register. Guess they got access to the beta testing.
- kirillzubovsky 15y agoI wonder what Jack Dorsey is thinking, while reading of all these. I seriously doubt he worries about "...one retailer and they weren't using the device because the square was too wonky ..." It just sounds like a problem too easy to fix, and I am sure they've got bigger fish to fry.
- dakrisht 15y agoDorsey is definitely reading, or I certainly hope he is! Good information here. Lot's of valid points, complaints, arguments. There are many ways to improve Square, the UI, the hardware, the usability, training, etc. They have a solid product.
- hansy 15y agoDid anybody go through the verification process when ordering the device? After I input some basic info (like my birthday and last 4 digits of my SSN), I was asked to answer questions I have no idea how they even came up with. One example is, "What hospital did you live near when you were on RandomName St.?" How did they immediately know what street I lived on some years back, and also that it was near a major hospital? The authentication was all pretty impressive, but kind of creepy too.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoThat doesn't seem like a useful security question at all. Anyone can trivially find out the answer via online maps, and meanwhile the actual person who lived at that location might not necessarily know the answer themselves without looking it up. At most, if you use it as a trick question ("Hah, caught you, the person you wanted to authenticate as never lived on RandomName St!"), you get one bit of information, which you could get much more straightforwardly by asking "Have you ever lived on RandomName St?".
- lebski88 15y agoStreet names are quite common though, knowing the street name is unlikely to give you enough information to answer the question. The real person however, would know the location of the street and be able to use this to look up the right answer if they didn't already know.
- gibybo 15y agoI suspect they request your credit report with your personal info (if you are a business requesting the report on someone else, you don't need the full SSN) and pull the information from there. Finding a hospital near your address just requires knowing where hospitals are, and those are in public directories.
- hansy 15y agoWhat I found weird was how out of all the landmarks around where I lived, it picked up on the biggest, the particular hospital in question. Maybe the question is a standard one, and I happened to add more meaning to it by dumb luck of where I lived.
- albahk 15y agoThe app is downloaded via the App Store - according to the terms of the app store, aren't Apple entitled to claim 30% of transactions through the app? edit: Or, at the very least, entitled to 30% of the fees charged by Square to the merchant?
- robbiet480 15y agoPretty sure Apple and Square have a special agreement in place. At a talk I went to by Jack Dorsey he said they met with Apple before launching Square.
- urbanjunkie 15y agoAlthough the immediate parent is being downvoted, it's actually interesting to understand why Apple have allowed this without collecting a % of the transaction fees that Square receives. Or perhaps they are collecting a (lower?) percentage.
- thatjoshguy 15y agoFrom what I understand In-app purchases (where Apple gets a 30% cut) are only required when the item is only for use from within the app (virtual currency, level packs, digital subscription etc). Purchasing a physical items does not require transaction to use Apple's IAP API. In fact, it is expressly forbidden.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoScanning through the page, I noticed one oddity in the screenshots: the "Add an Optional Tip" page showed various fixed-size tips, but no way to enter an arbitrary amount. In previous versions of the interface, I thought the UI had an option to enter an arbitrary tip amount.
- qdqss 15y agoSquare Register has all the features you need to run your business and gives you the freedom to decide when to use them.
- ssn 15y agoAny update on when this will be available in european countries?
- theneb 15y agoI'm hoping from the November press release they're moving international this year. They took on Branson as an investor too.
- disappearance 15y agoI'm not sure if I'm missing something, but desensitising the general public to devices that their card is being scanned through (and occasions where that might be appropriate) will surely lead to to an increase in card fraud. What's to stop someone jailbreaking an ipad, writing a custom fake ui, clipping in a square scanner, and writing off a days worth of cheap merchandise down at the park for a haul of card details? If this becomes common, will credit card companies still offer the same guarantees on transactions?
- dangrossman 15y ago> What's to stop someone ... writing off a days worth of cheap merchandise down at the park for a haul of card details? The fact that stolen credit card numbers, even with a full billing address and CVV2 code are still only worth a couple dollars on the black market. Your setup wouldn't even capture that, so your merchandise is probably worth more than the numbers. And you're putting yourself at pretty serious risk of getting caught by running this scam in person, when it's much easier to do some kind of phishing scam online anonymously, with more valuable results. Stolen credit card numbers just aren't very valuable. If you're not living in a nation with an ineffective or corrupt legal system, what are you going to do with the numbers without a high risk of getting caught? Making your own plastic cards and magnetic tracks is expensive and you end up on security camera video using them. Ordering anything tangible online means linking your fraud to your physical location one way or another. You can order a bunch of porn or other intangibles, but that's a pretty low reward for all the risk. In the end, it's a moot point anyway. Normal credit card terminals can be bought on eBay for less than an iPad and can be used for card theft just the same.
- disappearance 15y agoThanks. In europe we use chip and pin, so a fake app could collect the pin directly. If someone was to harvest 30 cards with pin, could they then visit an atm directly? Perhaps I'm underestimating the difficulty of cloning cards. If that is possible, CVV2 would be unnecessary. I hear your point about normal credit card terminals being available. As a european I wouldn't expect to see one on a stall by the side of a road though, and would normally be suspicious of anyone suggesting that they accept credit cards under these conditions.
- staunch 15y agoFirst time a URL like: https://squareup.com/register Hasn't been about signing up for the web site.
- Thomaschaaf 15y agoI don't understand where the actual cash came from in the video. Would this mean I still have to have a register to store the cash in? Wouldn't this make the whole process borked again?
- dmix 15y agoIf you scroll down on the sales page, theres a wireless/ethernet controlled cash box that can be purchased.
- theneb 15y agoThere's lots of talk about the survival of the Square reader under heavy demand, certainly another more durable reader needs to be produced. However is the market for square at this price point really for anything above one or maybe two point of sales? Using this setup in some bar environments would require some hardware to protect the iPad, I've worked looking after hardware in busy student union bars where the staff just destroy the tills with spillages. My impression of the earlier square products for POS were that it's intended for giving the small business something, not for running your local branch of Starbucks.
- rythie 15y agoI can't actually remember the last time I swiped my card and signed for anything, because we in the U.K., like most of Europe, use Chip and Pin (EMV is the official name). I wonder if Square will still function when this gets pushed into the U.S. market. Surely this is due soon in the U.S.? http://corporate.visa.com/media-center/press-releases/press1142.jsp http://corporate.visa.com/media-center/press-releases/press1...
- dangrossman 15y agoNFC contactless payment readers are already common here in big retail chains now. By the time the consumer adoption becomes more widespread, most phones and tablets will have NFC radios in them as well, so it'll just be a matter of software support (e.g. Google Wallet).
- yalogin 15y agoSquare will be in trouble if NFC takes off. That is why its coming up with what I think is its main product line, the register. The credit card reader thingy is not where it makes money. Once prople get hooked on the analytics it can hope to add the NFC functionality in and still keep going.
- ConstantineXVI 15y agoSquare seems to be attempting to counter NFC with Card Case[1]. Still requires the merchant to be using Square, but has the upshot of working /now/, with the cards/phones you already have, instead of maybe in a year or two when ISIS gets it's act together. [1] https://squareup.com/cardcase https://squareup.com/cardcase
- hboon 15y agoSquare as a company isn't tied to credit card processing. Credit cards just happens to what's popular now. If NFC takes off, the company will run with it. When that happens, the shops just need a new attachment or a device upgrade, the software just works. i.e. this would be how I would have done it.
- grinich 15y ago
- bostonvaulter2 15y agoThe text is all garbled in my stock Android browser. Please ut this seems like quite a nice idea.
- tnorthcutt 15y agoSame here (your first sentence).
- etfb 15y agoMust be an American thing, I guess. Is EFTPOS (ie debit card) less common in the US than in Australia? Seems odd to provide a credit card service by itself. People don't pay for coffee and things on credit, do they?
- lusr 15y agoI pay for everything I can with my credit card. It means I have a digital trail of all my spending, which makes budgeting much simpler.
- lbotos 15y agoI would venture to say a majority of American 20-somethings use a card as much as possible. My bank PNC has a decent toolset that allows you to do a lot of things automatically and includes a basic budgeting tool. It's pretty cool.
- thatjoshguy 15y agoI've always wanted to know about the 'international version' of Eftpos. A lot of internationals get confused at our Cheque/Savings/Credit. Also, the large majority of banks offer Mastercard/Visa debit cards where even though you press 'Credit', its your money from your Savings account. You get the benefit of more consumer protection via Mastercard/Visa, as well as contactless payment and sometimes not having to sign or enter PIN
- pbreit 15y agoWhy not? Why pay now when you can pay later for free?
- dodedo 15y agoWith 1% cash back, no less. I try to funnel all my expenses through a card -- and pay in full each billing cycle naturally.
- underwater 15y agoThe cash isn't free. You're paying the X% credit card tax on purchases via higher prices.
- felixchan 15y agoThat's a horrible logo. I had no idea that was "Square" at all when just looking at the logo.
- kmfrk 15y agoAs opposed to an Apple? I get that the logo is modelled on the dongle (which may or may not get phased out), but it's extremely generic and will probably not work very well for branding purposes in the future.
- unicron 15y agoThis is a gimmick or a hack. Not much better than what you will see on hackaday.com I did a LOT of POS work a few years ago for small businesses. An iPad/iPhone would be dead and broken in less than a month for most retailers. You need pretty hard wearing industrial grade kit if you don't want to throw it away 3 times a year. That flimsy card reader is almost comedic - you'll break it and your device. If it's your revenue collection equipment, it makes sense to buy something that will last i.e. was designed for the job rather than sit there not being able to take cards.
- Game_Ender 15y agoApple uses iPod touches with a more beefy card reader setup in their retail stores. You could do the same with a slightly modified iPad case, and a reinforced reader.
- unicron 15y agoIt would still be no good. If you drop one, it's dead. If you drop a Barclays PDQ, you pick it up and continue the transaction.
- savrajsingh 15y agoThis looks awesome! It's important they get this kind of product right on the first release -- because small business owners can't tolerate 'beta' for something so critical as their cash register. Case in point: One of my favorite restaurants in Seattle was using iPads for registers (not using Square's product). I came back a few months later and they had switched to a 'normal' POS system. "What happened to the iPads?" I asked. "There were too many issues and they crashed way too often." It was a case of a restaurant that wanted to be on the cutting edge -- but in the end it didn't work out, so they went with a standard solution that worked well. I don't doubt that square can execute -- they have already shipped some great products. I just want to point out that it's not as simple as some people might imagine.
- dguido 15y agoFWIW my local coffee shop uses ShopKeep and Perka and they work great! http://www.shopkeep.com/ipad-pos http://www.shopkeep.com/ipad-pos http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/perka/id428620381?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/perka/id428620381?mt=8