When it launched in 2009, Square revolutionized mobile payments by offering a card reader that plugged into your phone’s headphone jack and a flat rate of 2.75%. Eight years later, they are behemoth that has raised almost $600 million from investors and service millions of businesses. Will the new Square Register be a disruptor? We think so!
Square launched their new Register Stand today and at first glance it looks like a home run. Here’s why:
All in one solution: The Square Register offers a beautiful 13.5” screen, 7” customer facing screen, an ethernet port and five USB ports. The larger screen helps it compete with traditional POS systems that typically have a 13-15” screen. The ethernet and USB ports offer wired connectivity to all peripherals and the internet, making it a more reliable POS solution.
Accepts all payment types: The customer facing display has a magstripe, EMV and NFC readers which allow it to accept a variety of payment methods including magstripe cards, chip and pin transactions, Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay. The display’s tight integration with the rest of the hardware make it a versatile device, one that can easily accept new payment methods.
Perfect for enterprise customers: Square has a few enterprise customers, including Ben & Jerry’s, but until now the system wasn’t very conducive to large customers. Now that Square has full control of the hardware, they can customize the system for large customers and send the units preloaded with desired inventory and settings.
Even lower rate: Square understands that brick and mortar businesses that will make the initial investment of $999 for the stand will have higher payments volume. Because of that, Square is offering an introductory rate of 2.5% + 10 cents per transaction which can be lowered based on payments volume.
We believe the new Register Stand solves a lot of the pain points that customers have expressed with tablet point of sale systems and will be a hit among small businesses and enterprise customers. The $999 price point is a bit steep for a business looking to use the free headphone reader but a steal for any business evaluating legacy POS options.
Absolutely almost 100% fantastic work by Square with this new Register that has a customer facing screen, and integrating with all already acquire Square hardware, such as Cash Draw, Epson Printer etc… almost 100%… unfortunately, as does with all aspects of humanity, the Square engineers made a critical error, and did not include Bluetooth for the scanner that we already have, nor did they even think of including a simple usb-mounted Bluetooth dongle as a work-around.
The other failure is that once the new beautiful slick Register was installed, it wiped all previous price edits done a week ago, and reverted to the item prices of our cafe three weeks ago.
The problem with not having a wireless scanner, is that it then disallows the operator from walking away from the POS to scan something…
Reminds me of my handyman who once said “… ahhh, no matter, no one will notice that”, referring to a timber cross-section he had just completed, which he mounted imperfect and not at 90 degrees. Later that month I wanted to add a 90 degree bracket to that section for something else, and then realized this was never going to happen, because a 90-dgree bracket will simply not fit in an 84-degree “corner”. Always best to get it right the first time, and avoid “The perfect imperfect ripple effect”
Better luck next time