OS: iOS 3.0 or more recent, Android
CATEGORY: Business
RATING: 4.5/5
For a long time now smartphone app developers have worked incredibly hard to keep up with the constantly adapting needs of business users and one of the biggest things that is required right now is the need to take payment for goods and services whilst on the move.
There are obviously already services that are available through the internet on smartphones with the most popular being PayPal and MoneyBookers amongst others but many business users are finding that their customers don’t always want to use services like these.
To accommodate these more particular customers, business users can now use the Square app to take payments from credit cards directly from their handsets. This gives any business users running the Square app a significant advantage over their competitors, as a greater number of payment methods can often make the difference between a successful sale and an unsuccessful one.
The Square app is free for users to download and use but there is a charge every time users swipe the card or a user types in a card number for use. The current charge for using this app to swipe credit cards is 2.75 percent and for manually keying in card details (which is considered less secure) the charge is 3.5%. When originally released the app users also had to pay a per-transaction charge but this has been removed.
These charges may seem a little off-putting for some business users but when comparing the charges to those of sites like PayPal, which charge between 1.9-2.9 percent with a 30 cent fee per transaction, the Square charges are in fact quite reasonable.
By using Square business users can also refund customers and access a complete payment history whenever they like directly from the app making it a highly useful mobile payment tool for most users.
