PayPal, Square, Groupon Register Blows In MPOS Battle

Competition in the tablet-based MPOS space is heating up.

Major payments players PayPal, Square and Groupon all released updates or new programs for their mobile point-of-sale solutions yesterday, waiving transaction fees, hawking POS hardware and offering on-boarding incentives to a merchant base with an increasing appetite for tablet-based POS.

How are the three offerings similar, and what steps have they taken to differentiate themselves from he market? After Tuesday’s announcements, has any one company pulled ahead in the tablet-based MPOS race? PYMNTS.com takes a look at the three offerings

PayPal’s Cash For Registers

PayPal made perhaps the most aggressive push towards a larger share of the tablet-based cash register market yesterday, launching its “Cash for Registers” program with an interesting twist: the payments giant is offering free credit, debit card, check and PayPal processing for the rest of 2013. The offer extends only to “qualifying U.S. businesses” that turn in “dusty old cash registers” for PayPal Here, but that’s still offers quite the incentive to what we assume is a broad base of retailers.

“To deliver a delightful shopping experience at scale, merchants need to let go of their old cash register for innovative technology that will enable them to serve their customers better, and grow their businesses,” PayPal president David Marcus wrote in a blog post.

Marcus also made note of two features that would appear to take a … well … swipe at Square: marketing to PayPal’s customer base, and integration with hardware made by POS specialists. If you think the first sounds a lot like Square Registry, we had the same thought. And the latter seems diametrically opposed to Square’s strategy of providing much of the equipment needed for a full register experience.

“At PayPal we’ve spent a long time listening to small businesses, and retailers of all sizes, and we came to the conclusion that no one company can cater to the needs of all industries,” Marcus wrote in his post. “That’s why we have handpicked select partners that are each best-in-class in their respective categories.”

PayPal Here works as a standalone app on iPads, but is also integrated into POS devices from vendors such as Leaf, NCR Silver and ShopKeep, among others. The program is slated to take effect in June 2013.

Square’s Stand

Square’s release yesterday centered on a hardware platform developed specifically for the iPad, allowing users to further rely on the tablet as a full cash register solution. The solution can sync up to receipt printers, kitchen printers, barcode scanners and cash drawers and can be locked onto and rotated on the stand. It’s main feature, though, is a built-in card reader that allows users to swipe at the stand’s base, then sign on the iPad screen. Square’s traditional Square Reader dongle isn’t involved.

Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of Square’s release isn’t the platform itself, but the information the mPayments company revealed along with it. According to Square, iPad growth is outpacing smartphone growth among its users, and iPad customers now represent almost half of all payments processed by Square. The company also said that the average payments volume processed by tablet users is more than double the average volume of their smartphone counterparts, and that they process $15 billion in payments overall, excluding Starbucks.

“Local business owners take as a given that they need an ugly, slow, expensive, and complicated point of sale system cluttering their counter,” said Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Square, in a statement. “Square Stand is elegant, fast, affordable, and easy to use. Whether you’re selling cupcakes, cardigans, or cappuccinos, running your business with Square has never been easier.”

Square Stand costs $299 and is currently available for pre-order, but will be stocked in Best Buy stores and other retailers beginning in early July. Select merchants in major cities such as New York, Washington D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles will begin using Square Stand today.

Groupon’s Breadcrumb POS

After an awkward false start of sorts on Monday, Groupon officially launched its new MPOS app – Breadcrumb POS – yesterday, extending the name of its hospitality-based Breadcrumb solution to a wider point-of-sale platform. The drill here is familiar: the app is free, is designed to replace traditional cash registers and can be synced up with a host of additional hardware components, some of which Groupon is offering through its Breadcrumb Store.

Among Breadcrumb’s chief incentives to merchants: free processing for its first $5,000 in credit card transactions, a “low-price guarantee” with transaction fees and the promise of reduced deposit time from two or three business days to 24 hours, which can go a long way for small businesses.

“With this launch we can help every local business replace their outdated cash registers with a modern, affordable, money-saving tool that allows them to save on credit card transaction fees and run their businesses better,” said Mihir Shah, VP Merchant OS in a statement. “The successful adoption of Breadcrumb Pro by restaurants and bars has been very encouraging, with some of the finest venues in the country using it to run their businesses. As a result, we decided to launch Breadcrumb POS and bring the power and simplicity of this product to more merchants.”

PYMNTS.com spoke with Seth Harris, GM at Breadcrumb POS last week, and he alluded to some of Tuesday’s changes without giving away anything too telling.

“As we move forward over the next, I don’t know if its two, five or eight years, but I’m pretty confident that there is going to come a point where at least local businesses are no longer buying bulky legacy terminals, and they are all going with tablet point of sales,” Harris told PYMNTS.com.

What do you think? Did one payments company pull ahead in the MPOS wars yesterday? Let us know in the comments below.