Square Finally Gives Up on Square Wallet and Bets on New Order-Ahead App

http://recode.net/2014/05/12/square-finally-gives-up-on-square-wallet-and-bets-on-new-order-ahead-app/

by uptown • 12 years ago

50 51 12 years ago

droob• 12 years ago

I used Square Wallet all the time, and was frequently told, "That was the first time I've done that!"

bitsm• 12 years ago

From the outside, it's hard to dispute that Wallet didn't have enough "utility value", but Square didn't seem to do much to market Wallet to merchants.

Almost none of the local merchants I tried using Wallet with knew about the feature, and some merchants didn't show up in it at all (they were using Square to run simple cash transactions -- i.e., no product catalog entered into Square).

jowiar• 12 years ago

The biggest utility problem for wallet was that the processes in question were:

"Does this merchant use Square? Sweet - I'll give it a try. Pull phone out of pocket, open app, wait for GPS to lock on and find the merchant, check in to merchant, tell checkout person I'm using wallet. Wait for them to try to figure it out since I'm the first who has used it in a month. Charge account"

vs.

"Pull piece of plastic out of wallet. Charge account".

untog2• 12 years ago

I used Square Wallet where I could, because if I used my card I had to sign on the iPad screen, which was always kind of awkward.

But I don't really know why I had to do that - in plenty of other places I can charge ~$5 without signing. And the software was controlled by Square. So effectively, Square Wallet helped me solve a problem that Square caused in the first place.

Now I have Google Wallet enabled for tap payments on my phone. Every time I use it I feel like I'm living in the future. Except I can only use it in Duane Reade.

kkwok• 12 years ago

Not sure if this is why Square required you to sign, but rates for covering fraud are affected by whether you have customers sign or not for credit cards.

bpicolo• 12 years ago

The thing I find most awkward is that I have to click "No Tip" every time I order something.

cbhl• 12 years ago

One of the things that drives me nuts is that Chip-and-PIN drove all the Canadian retailers to buying fancy new payment terminals that are NFC-enabled -- but Google Wallet NFC isn't available in Canada.

Whereas down here in the states we're lucky if Walgreens, McDonald's, and Old Navy will take NFC payments.

tedchs• 12 years ago

It benefits the merchant if you have to sign because that's also the place where you can choose to leave a tip. It sounds much nicer to hear "here is my iPad, please sign" than "here is my iPad, please click the button for your desired tip".

egypturnash3• 12 years ago

It's great if you use it at a place where you're a regular, and have told Square to check in automatically based on your location.

Order drink, chat with server while they make it, they know by now you're probably paying with Square. Done.

vs.

Order drink, chat with server while they make it, dig in purse for wallet, hope it's not one of those days where you accidentally left your wallet back at home while switching bags. (Yes this really happens to me sometimes.)

If you have, say, a coffee shop you regularly go work at, and they use Square, Wallet is totally awesome.

Goronmon• 12 years ago

Order drink, chat with server while they make it, dig in purse for phone, hope it's not one of those days where you accidentally left your phone back at home while switching bags.

This situation seems just as likely as the one you mentioned.

melville_X• 12 years ago

/switching bags/switching pants/switching jackets/

Happens all the time. I almost never forget my smartphone somehow.

inthewoods4• 12 years ago

"Square Wallet provided a very magical experience but didn’t have a lot of the utility value,” Square’s Ajit Varma said in a recent interview."

I'll admit it - I threw up a little bit in my mouth when I heard "magical" in this context. For me, utility is the magic.

And then this: "That said, the company raised some eyebrows a few weeks back when it said it would charge businesses eight percent for these order-ahead transactions, rather than the 2.75 percent flat rate for most credit card purchases that run through Square’s platform. The reasoning, it said, was that the feature would help bring in new customers."

8%? For a SMB operating on likely thin margins? Merchants would be crazy to sign up for this service.

kcsomisetty• 12 years ago

the premise is, it is marketed to merchant as 'the business you would not have without us'. Merchant will treat this as 'referal commision + payment processing'

JonFish85• 12 years ago

And pay 8% for the service? I'd think at such a high rate, having that extra business doesn't really strike me as worth getting at that point.

Disclosure: I work for a company somewhat in this space.

inthewoods4• 12 years ago

The problem I see with that approach is that there is no guarantee it will bring in new customers. Seems just as likely that it will actually bring existing customers. Second, if they are trying to get traction, then they need the merchants on board to create enough supply side to have ordinary consumers want to download an app and use it. They just created friction for merchant sign-up.

vertex-four• 12 years ago

For the record, these "order-ahead transactions" are what services like Just-Eat in the UK, and GrubHub in the US, do for takeaways. Here in the UK, Just-Eat charges 11% plus VAT, and they still have huge amounts of takeaways sign up for them, because when people like me think "I want takeaway", I go to Just-Eat's website. I see that GrubHub charges 13.5% on average.

I don't know whether that'll translate well to things other than takeaway, but Square obviously thinks it will.

inthewoods4• 12 years ago

When you say "11% plus VAT", are they charging the consumer or the business owner?

wpietri• 12 years ago

I think "magical" is a reasonable term for it. A lot of tech marketing involves people being wowed. Apple, for example, is great at it.

Utility is definitely the long-term driver, but I'm eternally surprised how far a product can get on "magic". 3D, for example, has been running on that since at least the 1950s.

mbesto• 12 years ago

I'll quote Don Draper here: "Technology is a glittering lure"[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHUUyx0d7qw

inthewoods4• 12 years ago

Apple is great at making something that has a lot of utility and then making it look/work great as well. To me that is what defines magic. No utility + pretty interface = unmagical.

uptown• 12 years ago

Where is Square's major market penetration? I'm guessing SF and NYC, but in New York City I think I've only seen it used in one store, and even there I'm not sure the system they were using was Square. I know they also ran a trial handling payments in city taxis, but that trial only tested 13 cabs, and was pulled shortly after starting.

natrius• 12 years ago

Anecdotally, about a third of small businesses (cafes, food trucks, etc.) use Square here in Austin. Another third use PayPal or Intuit. The rest use something else. Square has plenty of retailers here, and cab drivers often use Square to pay 2.9% instead of the ~5% their companies charge them to accept cards.

thrownaway24242• 12 years ago

That sounds like a pretty biased sample. I'd be surprised if square has more than five percent of the market in any identifiable geographic region, even SF, hell, even within a mile of their headquarters.

morganherlocker• 12 years ago

I see them mostly in trendy bakeries or cafes in the south east US. I also see them all the time in cabs in many parts of the US.

imsofuture• 12 years ago

I find them most often (and useful, it turns out) in really out of the way places. I live in a town of 800 people in Montana -- 2 of our 4 food establishments use Square (a BBQ joint + a Pizza place). I've also purchased Lobster Rolls on remote, tiny Maine islands with Square.

egypturnash3• 12 years ago

I think about half the coffee shops in Seattle take Square.

It is SUPER ubiquitous when you go to a comic book convention; anyone who is at all serious about sitting behind a table selling their comics will have a Square reader. I'm one of those people, and we LOVE Square because it's made it a lot easier to make a sale.

When I go to the local farmer's market, a lot of the people there use Square as well. There's a fair number of clunky single-purpose credit card devices, and some other credit card acceptance methods that work much like Square, but over the past year or two I've seen people mostly shifting to Square.

Note that the two classes of itinerant merchants I cite usually don't work with Wallet; that requires having a fairly permanent place of doing business.

duaneb• 12 years ago

Small businesses that don't want to deal with getting merchant accounts. Anyone with a phone can se square.

timdorr• 12 years ago

This could be cool. We've got a coffee shop in our building that has a Square POS system (which is itself pretty neat). In theory, I'll be able to order by drink before I get there. That's pretty neat!

Their POS system combined with an easy way to enable online ordering is a huge win for the retailer.

thrownaway24242• 12 years ago

Wallet wasn't really intrusive enough. It should have been able to detect proximity to the merchant and raise and Android notification to make the first payment easier and to make enabling autopay easier. But unfortunately I don't think their location detection, or the features offered by the platforms were up to the task. Even for the businesses I frequent and for which I have auto pay enabled, half the time it didn't work. Eventually the novelty wore off and I reverted to cash. It's better for the merchant anyway.

thisjepisje2• 12 years ago

Bitcoin, anyone?

hnnewguy• 12 years ago

The vast majority of people have no problems with the multitude of payment options already available (from cash to credit to debit to Square, etc) and have no use whatsoever for Bitcoin. Sorry.

thisjepisje2• 12 years ago

No need to apologize, I didn't intend to start a discussion on bitoin's usefulness. It's just that a system like this would be very handy for those of us who do like btc.

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

I can't sort out if this is an option already, but I think it would be a smart move for Square to have in store kiosks (locked ipads) that let people enter their orders directly.

This has good outcomes for both the store and Square.

For the store, having the kiosks helps reduce entry errors and waste (no order takers missing the customer saying 'no-mayo') as well as being able to keep less staff on hand.

On the Store's backend - tickets just come out of the printer (or show in their view of the app) so it's not so jarring when an order-ahead entry gets thrown into the mix. Plus each person using the Kiosk entry can get a very natural 'up-sell' to the order ahead app.

silencio• 12 years ago

no order takers missing the customer saying 'no-mayo'

There's still room for mistakes where the chef/cooks/employees miss "no mayo", and where the customer fucks up and forgets to say "no mayo" in the first place or can't because they can't figure out how to say it. Or something similar to that. And then customers expect you to magically read their minds anyway.

Why do I say this? One day at my restaurant I watched someone ask for "extra mayo" and I watched the cook put double the usual amount on there, which is customary for "extra x" orders. Customer then took the burger apart and said "that's not enough". Cook then doubled the mayo that's already on there. At this point keep in mind that the burger is coated in mayo and will be dripping it while he's eating - hell, it's already oozing mayo everywhere and it's quite gross to look at. She started using spoons to pile it on (also because it was already served so we can't use our regular utensils to put more mayo on there). He then started screaming obscenities about how my cook is such a cheapass and she's terrible at her job because who the fuck calls his burger "extra mayo" because he wants EVEN MORE MAYO on there. At this point I was shocked for a second but my brain finally kicked in fast enough to tell him to apologize and leave or else I'm calling the police before he might do something stupid like throwing food. He left his burger behind and I had the great pleasure of letting the cook throw it out. Really, you want even more mayo than that you tell people how much mayo you want in the first place. Or bring your own, because there was more mayo than meat on the burger - not kidding.

Then there's the winner of the month the other day where a customer spent _forever_ asking for the price of a food and then the same food without fries, and then ordered the food without fries because she couldn't afford like the $1 extra for fries and dug around in her purse to even pay for the food by itself. She called back two days later saying "so I ordered x with fries and i got the food without fries on x day at x time, can i get a refund, it was x cashier and she screwed up" - lady, for one you were the only person that ordered that in the couple hours around the time you gave us and we see it on the POS, if you had a problem you should have brought it up before you even dug in, we also STILL remember what you did because not many customers dig around and upturn their purse on the counter to pay for a $3 item, and lastly there is no way in hell I'm believing a random stranger like that before my own employees that I trust to tell me the truth because I don't punish them for most small mistakes like that.

So yeah. The customer is ...snark always....snark snort right.

BTW when I first took over said restaurant, Square Register actually didn't even support modifiers and didn't for a while after that - and it's still meh compared to other iPad systems on the market. Lots of competition and mediocre apps makes me want to do something in this industry (and how many developers actually can say they have experience with restaurants?) and then I stop caring because it's "good enough"..maybe I should just go work for one of these companies.

Jormundir2• 12 years ago

Square has been criticized a lot in the recent months for putting out too many different products. What I like best about this announcement is that it's not just a new product, but an evolution of one they already had. This is giving me a lot of confidence that Square really is going to nail both the business side of transactions, and consumer side.

Square wallet was cool, but the experience was obviously incomplete. With Order-Ahead, my routine has become super convenient. I order some food, then go to the gym without having to bring anything-- no wallet or phone or keys. When I'm done working out, I stop by the restaurant on the way home and pick up my food.

I tried Order-Ahead this morning, the experience still feels incomplete, but you can tell Square is creeping towards a much smoother way for customers to interact with businesses.

kirillzubovsky• 12 years ago

Heh. This is a bummer. I hope they bring the Wallet back insider the Order app or elsewhere. I've been using it all the time, with merchants that accept Walle, and love it.

Unfortunately, it seems that only "progressive" merchants are the ones who enable pay-by-phone.

There was actually a merchant who told me they've disconnected the feature, because "people who live nearby, would often appear on their screen, when they passed by." I thought this was pretty much retarded, given those same people were their regulars, but whatever.

It's just a little sad to see cool technology being dropped.

greggman• 12 years ago

I've always been curious if they can reproduce the NFC style wallets in Japan (Asia?) in the USA.

Here in Japan the train companies have NFC cards. The cards act mostly as cash. You put money on the card itself. I don't know exactly how the accounting works but AFAIK there's no server being contacted when you make a purchase. The system some how instantly deducts the money from your card and updates your history on the card.

This makes them super convenient unlike stuff like Square Wallet or even Google Wallet. You tap the card/phone on the machine and you've paid in under 1 second. No need to press anything, type any passwords, nothing.

The chips were later added to feature cell phones around 2006 so you could tap your phone instead of a card. You can also add more cash on them from your phone. Some Japan only Android phones also have them. Of course iPhone does not.

Trains, busses, many taxis, vending machines, convenience stores, some restaurants have the readers next to their registers.

Transactions are stored on the card and many laptops in Japan have built-in readers. My 2006 Vaio did. Touch your card to some spot on the surface of the laptop and get instant expense report for work/taxes. You can add credit to the cards on your laptop as well.

I have no idea how they prevent fraud given they can be updated locally (filling them with money without going through the proper channels). As for theft, scanning people as they walk by, they do seem to need to be within 1cm or so to read/update. I haven't looked into it though. On the other hand they aren't tied to any other money meaning they're basically like carrying cash. If you lose it all you lost is your money on the card and your purchase history. There's no "account" and it's not connected to any bank or credit card so the damage is minimized.

I have no idea if those would go over anywhere in the USA except maybe NYC, Chicago, SF. They arguably work in Japan because so many people commute so even if you never purchase anything they're super convenient for commuting (no need to buy tickets). Once you have one they end up being convenient for other things.

At the same time, I don't see anything less ever taking off in the USA. Google Wallet etc aren't more convenient than credit cards. Felica cards are.

http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/

I realize I think in SF the Clipper card and in London the Oyster cards are the same tech? But I don't think either can be used for anything other than trains/busses.

commandar• 12 years ago

I was only up there for a week, but Chicago's CTA Ventra cards seem to work in this general way. Getting on the bus or train involved tapping the card on a reader. They're also Mastercard branded with a magstripe and can be loaded up with funds for general use, as I understand it.

I was up there last fall and they were just starting to roll them out.

wehadfun• 12 years ago

What problems with paying with credit card are solved with paying by phone?

You can loose both, you can forget both, Also credit cards are water proof, drop proof, have no battery issues, no network connection issues. Even though you could leave your credit card at home you still need to carry your drivers license, work badge, grocery discount card, student id, gym membership card, atm card in case you need to get cash, make up, car keys, so what if you have to carry an extra card.

nairteashop• 12 years ago

A few reasons why I'd like to pay by phone:

- It's a bit easier to pull out my phone from my pocket vs. pulling out my wallet, then locating my card, and then pulling that out

- Tapping my phone is an easier process than aligning and sliding my card through a narrow slit

- I'd love it if coin-like functionality is one day integrated into my phone, so I can select a specific card to use vs. digging through my wallet for it, or switch cards quickly and try again if the first one gets denied, etc.

These are all admittedly minor, but many successful technologies are about increased convenience anyway.

jgalt212• 12 years ago

Square Wallet failed to take off besides getting some nice air time during a 60 Minutes piece Jack Dorsey.

There should be a kickstarter for media coverage. e.g. this tech is so neat and has such a good chance of being transformative that 60 Mintues, or some other big media outlet should to a 15 minute piece on it.

Square Finally Gives Up on Square Wallet and Bets on New Order-Ahead App

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